Tijeras blanco titanio (White Titanium Scissors) is a prime example of Sicilia’s output in the 1980s, with his free-flowing brushwork, a notable use of matter, and an everyday object as the core focus of the composition. The year of this painting, 1984, was the artist’s last year in Paris.
Around the same time he also made various Tijeras negras (Black Scissors) as part of a larger body of work featuring domestic appliances and tools: a universe of functional objects showcased in his solo exhibition at Galería Fernando Vijande in Madrid (1984) which earned Sicilia a solid reputation in Spain.
After quitting his studies at the School of Fine Arts of Madrid, Sicilia had moved to Paris in 1980, where he began forging a career that would lead him to become one of the most widely acclaimed Spanish contemporary painters. In 1985 he settled in New York, inaugurating a period of refinement of his painting that placed it on the road towards abstraction. This period would account for Tulips and Flowers, two of the most significant series in the artist’s career.
For Sicilia the 1980s saw a growing shift away from the Neo-Expressionism of his earlier works to a more gestural abstraction. His way of engaging with abstraction always begins with single motifs, firstly consisting of objects and later of natural elements. Having said that, in Sicilia’s own words: “the motifs are nothing but an excuse for a formal change, allowing me to focus on painterly concerns while the idea remains unchanged and essentially unaltered.”
Light and colour are the core concerns of this great artist, whose career was awarded with Spain’s National Visual Arts Prize in 1989.
In the 1990s, a period Sicilia defines as “mystic,” the colour white inundates the surface of the canvas and the motifs became less sharply delineated and in fact nearly disappeared altogether. After this interval, colour made a return and the canvas is gradually transformed from poetic surfaces, in which the use of wax lent an almost spectacular texture to the floral compositions, to others where matter and image make a comeback.