José María Sicilia

JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954).
Untitled, 2000.
Mixed media (oil and wax) on wood.
Signed on the back. Dated and located (Soller).
Provenance: Joan Prats gallery in Barcelona.
Measurements: 252 x 160 cm; 252 x 162 cm (frame).

Light and darkness, chaos and cosmos, order and chance, are the obverse and reverse of the vital and artistic philosophy of José María Sicilia. In this large format composition, cosmic latency and mystical light are suggested by the use of wax (which Sicilia always understood in its plastic symbolism of trace, poetry, transience and memory) on a dark background like the night sky.

Sicilia began her studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, although in 1980 she abandoned them and moved to live in Paris. Two years later he presented his first solo exhibition, in a style in line with the neo-expressionism then fashionable in Europe. It will be in the mid-eighties when his work reaches a great national and international projection. In 1986 he presents at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York a group of works that shows a strong purification of the previous style, towards an abstract painting in which he will progressively eliminate any formal reference. In the nineties this reductionist aesthetic will affect the chromatic range, leaving the forms suggested by the reflection of light on the surface. A new material treatment of subtle poetic resonance, based on waxes that let floral themes slightly transparent, brings color back to an already fully consecrated work. José María Sicilia has been awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (1989), and is represented in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York and the CAPC in Bordeaux, among many other art centers and museums.