Ethics - the only art of the future? Alicia Chillida

"Flamenco singing is -together with jazz and Arabic music- the most vivid way of expressing people. Something that comes from Byzantium, passes through Judea and stays a little while in the Gregorian chants".
(Enrique Morente)

It was the end of the eighties in Madrid, we were beginning to listen to flamenco, especially Camarón and Morente, still in the radiocassette, we also attended his concerts, we were moved. I remember Enrique's presentation of his daughter Estrella at the Auditorium in the nineties, we were afraid that she would not be as extraordinary as he was, but we were not disappointed. I used to work at the Reina Sofia Museum and I took some artists like Vito Acconci or Anselm Kiefer to Enrique's concerts, I thought it was important for them to know that voice.

When in 1996 he exhibited José María Sicilia in the Velázquez Palace those red flowers, I was certain that they must have known each other, both converged in their interest in the Spiritual Canticle of St. John of the Cross, and they made it their own, from the small leaves of the book impregnated with wax to the musical variations in flamenco key. 

José María Sicilia emerges in the artistic scene in the eighties, and takes the floral theme as the thread of his pictorial evolution. This exhibition offers us a vision of the flower, abstract in its beginnings, in a naturalistic key later, poetic at all times. Its contemplation attests to the intense emotion that nature arouses in the human spirit. No one explains it better than the artist when he states: "When I paint a flower, I think of something that must have a soul.".

I snuck into Morente's dressing room after a concert, hand in hand with Antonio Benamargo, greeted him and handed him the catalog of José María Sicilia's exhibition, L'horabaixa, to tell him that I would like to establish a partnership between the two of us. It was important to present outside Spain a Flemish artist together with a painter, in a fertile dialogue of equals.

Years later, with Borja Casani, we agreed on a meeting between the artists, the appointment was in 2002, sponsored by the SEC, at the Frans-Hals Museum in Haarlem, Holland: a painting exhibition in a former slaughterhouse, now part of the museum, and a flamenco concert in the gothic cathedral of St. Bavo.

I still have the image of Enrique with his graceful gait crossing the city square, he was very animated, he was excited about this experiment. During the rehearsal, upon learning that Mozart had played that organ in his childhood, he immediately asked to see the organist (whom he christened Anton "the Turkey" to assimilate his unpronounceable Dutch name) and improvised a couple of songs with him.

The concert surprised everyone, it was one of our best collaborations, as we would later recognize. He opened with The Dark Night by San Juan de la Cruz and then deployed a classic repertoire with the figure of the flower: tangos, soleares, alegrías... and even boleros. Enrique directed his voice and made it bounce against the vaults, he played with it until "illuminating and filling the church with flowers", as one of his songs said. It was night, the queues to enter surprised us, they were much larger than expected, in fact there were people who could not access the enclosure, but they listened to him outdoors.

From the very first moment a complicity was created between the three of us. Responding to her hospitality, J.M. Sicilia and I went to Granada, to her house in front of the Alhambra, and ate Aurora's potaje. to her house in front of the Alhambra, and we ate Aurora's stew. It has been a privilege privilege and pride to have promoted the work of Enrique Morente, a great artist and a great human being, of exceptional quality, elegance and intensity. exceptional quality, elegance and intensity. Albums such as Omega, Africa, Cuba, Cai and so many others, characterized by their love of risk, by their eagerness to experiment, to collaborate to experiment, to collaborate with other artists and disciplines, to transgress the limits. transgressing the limits. His enormous talent has been able to bring something new to music, to flamenco. new to music, to flamenco. This eagerness to be ahead of his time Enrique Morente continues to be the future.

This first collaboration was followed by others, such as the project of The Thousand and One Nights: Sicily, Morente and Goytisolo, presented at CAAM in 2005, where the dialogue between painting, music and literature would take us from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to Tenerife, Cairo, and Amman, with the help of Seacex. A large exhibition of Sicily, a literary workshop by Juan Goytisolo and three memorable concerts in which a digital scenography of Sicily enveloped the musicians within the cycle of light and twilight: the image of a firmament transformed into a burning labyrinth, an eclipse....