JOSE MARIA SICILIA (Madrid, 1954). "El instante", 2013. Ink on Japan paper. Attached certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. Signed with initials and dated in the lower right corner. Measurements: 210 x 151 cm; 224 x 163.5 x 163.5 x 5.5 cm (frame). The Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid houses in its collection a triptych entitled "The Instant", made only a year before the present painting. The use of the same title reveals Sicilia's interest in time, its fleetingness and variability when it comes to understanding and inhabiting it. It is this concept that Sicilia turns into a visual poetry, apparently random and arbitrary, but consolidated through strict rules, sometimes imperceptible to the human eye. The movement occurs in this image following a multiplicity of shapes and colors that are suspended in a white immensity. In fact, rescuing the words that the artist himself dedicated to the triptych of the Reina Sofia Museum, we can understand this lyrical landscape proposed by the artist; "This work is composed by translations of birdsongs through computer programs. The bird's song is the instant, a place from which no one returns, where there is no past or future. This instant is a fullness in which we know we exist, it feeds us and eats us at the same time. The instant is to touch in time what is not time." Sicilia began his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid, although in 1980 he abandoned them and moved to live in Paris. Two years later he will present 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 of 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 centers.