Expressiveness and elegance join forces with matter and the power of colour in this work by 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.

In Espacio sobre encuentros (1995) the canvas is divided into two by a central yellow line overlaid on another, wider, white stripe, a recourse also used in other pieces from the series Máscaras de la mirada, from 1995. Once again, Ciria falls back on geometry to organise the composition, though in this case giving it a major role by bringing it to the foreground and emphasising it.