José María Sicilia

JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954).
Untitled, 1998.
Oil on wax mounted on board.
Signed dated on the back and located (Seller, Mallorca) on the back.
Measurements: 122 x 122 cm; 124 x 124 cm (frame).
This work, made in 1998 by José María Sicilia, represents one of the emblematic poppies that have been a recurrent part of his artistic production. With an aesthetic that combines abstraction and organic representation, Sicilia works with color and matter to explore the fragility and power of nature.
The poppy, with its vibrant red petals and blurred dark center, emerges against a light background that accentuates its chromatic intensity. The pictorial technique employed by Sicilia, which integrates the use of glazes and the spraying of pigment with wax, generates an ethereal and almost photographic effect, where the image dissolves in the support. This treatment of color and form reflects his interest in capturing the essence of the flower beyond its conventional figurative representation, giving it a sensorial and poetic dimension.
Within the artist's iconography, the poppy is a symbol that has appeared at various stages of his career. His choice is not accidental: this flower has been historically associated with the transience of beauty, dreams, and even memory and oblivion. Sicilia turns the poppy into a plastic motif that allows him to investigate the relationship between form and dissolution, presence and absence, recurring themes in his work.
Sicilia began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, but in 1980 he abandoned them and moved to live in Paris. Two years later he presented his first solo exhibition, in a style in line with the neo-expressionism then fashionable in Europe. Subsequently, it was the various objects of the everyday world that became the protagonists of his works. Vacuum cleaners, irons, scissors, buckets, etc., will be the center of a new language in which Sicilia will grant a greater and progressive importance to the treatment of textures. His work is organized in series on still lifes, landscapes and, the best known, on the Bastille and Aligre neighborhoods, where he himself lives and works. It was in the mid-eighties when his work reached a great national and international projection. In 1986 he presented at the Blum Helman Gallery in New York a group of works that showed a strong purification of the previous style, towards an abstract painting in which he progressively eliminated any formal reference. This new style is reflected in the series "Tulips" and "Flowers". In the nineties this reductionist aesthetic will affect the chromatic range, leaving the forms suggested by the reflection of light on the surface. A new material treatment of subtle poetic resonance, based on waxes that let floral themes slightly transparent, brings color back to an already fully consecrated work. José María Sicilia has been awarded the National Prize for Plastic Arts (1989), and is represented in the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the MOMA and the Guggenheim in New York and the CAPC in Bordeaux, among many other art centers and museums.