José María Sicilia

The first exhibition at the IVAM Centre del Carme fulfilled its purpose of displaying the work of young, internationally-known artists who at that moment were providing new perspectives on contemporary art. While emphasis was given to artists who made specific interventions in the splendid architecture of the Ferreres and Goerlich museum rooms, the inclusion of José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) focused discussion on painting of an abstract, expressionist leaning whose makers, however, avoided defining it as such, preferring to escape hackneyed labels.

In Sicilia’s paintings from 1987 and 1988, we see a search for a fertile dialogue between form and background, but also between the painting and the canvas, with the latter understood as a container and the former the content; and also an attempt to break away from the aforementioned formalistic conceptions. Outlines of plantlike figures, particularly flowers, appear in fusion with the background but marking out an organic terrain that contrasts with geometric figures. The duality between painting and canvas, that is, between the painted matter integrated as an abyss into the support, is a reflection of the duality between the organic and geometric, the solid or opaque and the transparent or veiled.

Sicilia studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and moved to Paris in 1980, where he shared his artistic exploration and discoveries with the artist Miguel Ángel Campano (Madrid, 1948 – Cercedilla, 2018). He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas (National Plastic Arts Prize) in 1989.