A thousand nights and one night. Alicia Chillida

The light of dawn startled Sahrazad and she stopped talking. "What an extraordinary and incredible story!" exclaimed her sister Dinarzad, "Well, if next night I am still alive and his majesty the king permits me, I will tell you the rest, which is even more amazing," replied Sharazad..

One more night, more time! implored Sahrazad. When night came and at her sister's request, she managed to save her life and the lives of thousands of women through words, through storytelling. The Thousand and One Nights is a compilation of stories woven from the dawn of humanity, the fruit of a millenary oral tradition. This spirit of the multiple, unfinished, circular book invited us to create a new story, a new dream within the dream, a multidisciplinary project that would bring together three creators: J.M. Sicilia, Enrique Morente and Juan Goytisolo, who, from painting, music and literature, would be able to recall in unison the spirit of the Infinite Book, a cultural convergence between East and West.

The light that faild gives its title to that tremulous and dramatic light about to be extinguished that has been the protagonist of J.M. Sicilia's work for the last ten years, this seems to be the best meaning for a work that strives to express, through painting, an instant of light, of intensity. Sicilia alludes to the night, to darkness as light and links with the reflection of the millenary book.

The project The Thousand and One Nights presents a review of the painting, sculpture and drawing that J.M. Sicilia has created during the last decade. A poetic line that appears traced over time as a personal path, which transcends the lyrical character of the work to delve into the problems of painting and vision: the search for the "heart" of the painting through a dialogue between background and surface, light as an element that defines this relationship and the image as a vehicle of emotion and tension, capable of structuring the color plane. "When I paint a flower, I think of something that must have a soul, a freshness, and that the fact of contemplating it is equivalent to breathing. In short, it is something more related to the intensity I put into trying to understand this life than to a formal problem. During the eighties, Sicilia's pictorial richness was presented under abstract icons which he paradoxically titled "Flowers", these gave way to the white paintings of the early nineties: the series on St. John of the Cross, which underlie mysterious images that can be guessed under the monochrome surface. Obsessed with reducing the dialectic between background and figure and longing for greater purity, he resorts to photographic means and virgin wax as the essential material of his reflection. (...)

The last paintings, created for the exhibition, are accompanied by an extensive series of black drawings, which follow in parallel to them, as if they were an inventory of dreams or as if they were the nights corresponding to the days in which the paintings were born. In the same way that the drawings act on the rest of the work, breaking and multiplying the meanings, this is how the story is based on ramification and concatenation, the story must contain stories; the story must contain stories; the dream, dreams, the images, images. And in this way the unique is broken in favor of the multiple, a suggestion of infinity. This is how Andrés Sánchez Robayna describes the creative process of the Millennial Book. (...)

The fluidity of the narrative, the helical architecture of the CAAM space that hosts this exhibition, as well as Sicilia's creative cadence converge in the idea of the labyrinth, which spatially and conceptually organizes the exhibition and the scenography of the concert. In Sicilia's recent work, the motif of the flower is again abstracted until it disappears, eclipsed by a flash of light that dilutes it in spots of vivid and intense color. (...)

Morente has established over the years a constant dialogue with poetry, as evidenced by his compositions based on the works of Federico García Lorca, Manuel de Falla, María Zambrano or the mystical poetry of San Juan de la Cruz. At Fantasia del Cante Jondo Morente demonstrates that art, both popular and cultured, is the history of desire, of illusions and the fainting of the human condition in the face of reality. "If flamenco art has no feeling, it has nothing. Regarding the relationship of flamenco with music, not only Arab but Andalusian, there is something very clear, flamenco without the gypsies would be something else. It is a fact. The Andalusian folklore and the Spanish character are also determinant in the formation of an art that once consolidated, no longer has frontiers".

The third chapter of this project features Juan Goytisolo, who gives a master class on the Book, offering the theoretical and reflective framework of a work that, in his opinion, contains everything and whose spores have been fertilizing much of world literature, a cultural origin that is a sister to us all, since it contains the collective memory of the East and the West. Faced with violence, with the lack of understanding, Goytisolo has, as Sahrazad had to combat cruelty, an antidote: that individuals be seduced by literature, the most beautiful garden: that "closet full of books" to which anyone who wishes can have access.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2005).