José María Sicilia. Alicia Chillida

This monographic exhibition is a synthesis of the work of José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954) with the common denominator of virgin wax as the essential material of his reflection.

The works are grouped in ten series under the title L'horabaixaSicilia is the Mallorcan name for twilight, that moment of the day when, after sunset, clarity persists. Sicilia points to the metaphor of darkness as light, to the fleetingness of the instant and the fragility of life.

The exhibition presents a journey that visualizes the poetic line of the artist as a personal path, transcending his lyrical character to enter into the problems of vision, which he has dealt with constantly since the beginning of his career: the search for the "heart" of the painting through a dialogue between background and surface, light as a defining element of this relationship, and the image as a vehicle of emotion and tension capable of structuring the space of color.

Throughout his intense artistic career, Sicilia's work has been characterized more by attention to the pictorial matter, to the very process of the creation of the work, than by an emphasis on its contents. These have been rather the excuse for the deployment of expressive means: as evidenced by the everyday objects of the early years, the series of flowers, bees and other insects. There is in his work an air of mystery, of spirituality that escapes representation.

From the concealment and ambivalence of vision in the conceptual paintings of the early '90s, where images underlie images that are guessed under wax (Sanlúcar de Barrameda Series, Sanlúcar de Barrameda Manuscripts 1993), to the large gilded polyptychs and wax surfaces with trapped insects (The light that goes out, Rockdrille 1995-96); polychrome terracottas, with which the author experiments (Pillows and Hives 1997); and finally, the motif of the Flowers 1997, taken up again as a guiding thread in the evolution of his painting. In this regard, some critics speak of "naturalistic reinterpretation". The author has stated that nature interests him "as light, as meaning, as force", and more specifically with the virgin wax he understood that "one of the approaches that interest him most, light, could be resolved".

The central hall of the Palace appears as a specific project. Sicilia has created a group of works, in series, under the icon of the flower: The light that faild1995-96, are 22 large purple flowers; two large polyptychs: Paravents (Screens) y Grisailles (Gravel), grayish cloudy flowers from the realm of shadows, which act as the underside of the red ones. The towers present a retrospective view of the work: Rockdrille (Perforated rock), 1995-96, title of a poem of the Cantos by Ezra Pound; the large golden surface in the polyptych The light that faildand two works based on the intense dialogue with the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz: Sanlúcar de Barrameda Manuscripts y Sanlúcar.

Laurent Busine, curator of the exhibition, explained that the lines of conduct of the exhibition "have been elaborated over time, driven by the surprise experienced before each new work, under the clear evidence that the images were printed in the spirit, and its accumulation in abundance," to qualify that "the abundance lies more in the quality of the gaze that is directed towards the object than in the multitude or repetition of this". Busine collaborates with Sicilia in this exhibition whose starting point is the enclave of the Palacio de Velázquez building: a real garden, the Buen Retiro, and a garden of the spirit, the work of art, which tries to decipher the emotion that inhabits man before the mystery of nature.