Matter comes alive in the works of José Manuel Ciria. Constantly experimenting with different materials, he delicately manipulates each process, allowing them a certain degree of autonomy though keeping a careful eye on each and every one of the effects and movements produced.

Largely self-taught as an artist, after dropping out of art school early on, José Manuel Ciria, alongside Miquel Barceló (1957), is one of the most internationally acclaimed Spanish painters of the moment. His work could be classified as “controlled” , given that he organizes and analyses expressivity at all times and does not allow himself to be carried away by emotions or impulses.

After an early expressionist phase, at the beginning of the 1990s he started to engage with a brand of abstraction divested of mysticism, somewhere between geometric and gestural.

In April 1994, he won a scholarship for the Spanish College in Paris from the Ministry of Culture. It was around this time that he undertook his project dedicated to memory, which is still ongoing today. In fact, time and memory are the two recurrent themes of his whole practice. He transforms his memories into images which, in turn, become part of the memory.

Ciria addresses the relationship between art and time and explores new evolving chemical processes in materials. He contemplates and studies these processes and transfers them to artistic representation.

This conceptual analysis is the starting point for his series Mnemosyne, which the artist worked on at the same time as other exploratory series like Natural Encounters or The Use of the Word. Created in Madrid after his return from Paris, The French Model (1994) belongs to the latter series.

Ciria’s support of choice is the medium-weight plastic canvas, which, as the artist claims, gives him “the transparency of the elusive, like those distant memories which gradually become increasingly more opaque.”

In this work Ciria uses his signature grid. Visible in most of his paintings from this period, a black grid is used to organise the composition. Here, he relegates it to the background and blurs it with the purpose of preserving the prominence of the main area of colour expanding from the side in a dynamically descendent manner. It is a totally controlled area of colour which could remind us of the trace of water a wet glass leaves on a flat surface. A mark that tends to expand though something prevents it from doing so. Apparently without limits, the stain is semitransparent, with the colour advancing as if it were oil on water.

These effects are achieved using oil paint on a plastic support: an oily matter on a material with scant ability to absorb. Meanwhile, the unevenness of the support, with its seams and stains, acts as a visual stimulus.

Executed in a compact palette, The French Model stands halfway between figuration and abstraction. Through the area of colour Ciria imagines a French model. Here, the figurative or realistic presence lies not so much in the forms as in the title and meaning of the work. It could be said that the artist creates his own figures out of abstract elements.

For Ciria each work has a soul; each work entails a surprise. His art does not represent a particular mood: he thinks of the form and the colour comes afterwards, emerging in response to the question posed by each composition. That is why he is equally capable of creating silent, subtle and elegant pieces like The French Model and also explosive works of sumptuous colours, like the ones he is currently making.