We present Phasma, the seventh exhibition by José María Sicilia in Galería Joan Prats, where we show his recent work, with abstract pieces that incorporate fabrics and embroidery and whose shapes come from sonograms.
The word that entitles the exhibition, Phasma, of Greek origin, designates the specters and apparitions and refers, as described by the artist, to “something that appears and disappears, a butterfly that goes by flapping its wings” and that “speaks of the light as a fold”.
In the exhibition, together with the Phasma series, started in Japan, we find the series of El Instante, collages made from drawings of the last ten years, and works from the series La Locura del ver. The creation process of this last series is linked to a sonographic technology that results from an experiment carried out by Thomas Young in 1801, which allowed for the detection of the wave nature of light through its diffraction across two networks successively distanced from a luminous source. This experiment serves as a starting point for a software that allows Sicilia to decompose the sound in order to create cartographies of lines and shapes, some drawings, painting, collage and embroidery compositions that result in the works of La Locura del ver.
This technology gives José María Sicilia a tool to reach a new depth. In this new development of his work we find everything that was already present in his previous artistic evolution: the strength of color, the movement of light, a fondness for the organic and the process of unification and opposition that, since the eighties, his painting have shown. His first production had a strong expressionist character and deepened in the monochrome of white. Later on, his career is marked by the discovery of wax as a material, by the appearance of flowers, beehives and also by photography. Sicilia is a restless creator who has based his work on the questioning of shape. He is an artist who interrogates, who does not accept molds and feels the need to break the formats, summoning the emotion of the spectator.
José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) lives and works in Madrid. He has recently exhibited in Museo Casa de la Moneda and Calcografía Nacional, Madrid (2017); Musée Delacroix, Paris (2015), Palacete del Embarcadero, Santander (2014); Matadero, Madrid and Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art (2013); Hospital de la Caridad, Sevilla (2012); Maison Erasme, Brussels and Amos Anderson Art Museum of Helsinki (2010); Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum (2008). His work is present in important public and private collections, among which stand: Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MOMA, New York; Fundació ‘la Caixa’, Barcelona; Colección Banco de España, Madrid; Collection Ville de Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Torino; MNCARS, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The New York Public Library, New York.
