José María Sicilia: Suspendu à un fil

Forty years after the beginning of a precious collaboration, Galerie Chantal Crousel is pleased to welcome the ninth solo exhibition of José María Sicilia. In his recent works, he pursues his translation of sensitive and sublime phenomena into graphic representations. Deepening his research on the manifestations of light, the apprehension of time, and the translation of the non-visual and of oral storytelling traditions in his works, he transcribes them by exploring the technique of embroidery, characteristic of his recent work.

José María Sicilia is a leading figure of a new Spanish painting movement that emerged in the 1980s. He is one of a young generation of artists interested in materiality in painting. His early paintings—in oil painting and wax on wood—invite the viewer to experience a slow plunge into the material, while challenging him to see beyond representation.

In his recent series, silk becomes the main material. Between depth and surface, absorption and reflection of light, it captures the invisible, the ephemeral, the intangible, through the threads that render the richness and diversity of what escapes vision. Thus, silk, whose moiré effect is both transparent and opaque, allows the artist to reveal and conceal the immateriality of the forces that surround us and run through us.

The oscillation between unveiling and concealing runs through all the works presented in the exhibition. Consisting of a superposition of silk panels embroidered with lines and shapes, they are an attempt to translate sensitive but non-visible phenomena into visual and two-dimensional works. Thus, the artist graphically translates the song of birds in the series El Instante, the undulatory nature of light following Thomas Young’s experiment in 1801 in Ninfosis, the functioning of vision in Lucciola, the seismic waves of Fukushima in Accident, the multiple and ancestral voice of the tales of the Thousand and One Nights in Raconte-toi.