Jose Maria Sicilia at BlumHelman - painting - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

The viewer first encountering "Ficciones," a series of paintings through Jose Maria Sicilia, sees 15 monochromatic works, each about a lower extremity square. They are painted with oil, each in a distinctive tint ranging from near-fluorescent pink to black. The support is difficult to ascertain at first; it strike one as beings a corrugated packing material with a regular dot pattern like a benday shield broken by occasional slashes. Coming closer single sees that the dots are hexagonal openings and then realizes that the painting was done upon honeycomb. The slashes were made by the agency of worker bees.

The flow is a collaboration of sorts between human and nonhuman organisms. As the title insinuates the works imply stories--but stories that are outside our view On a formal level, the support yields an consequence reminiscent of Lichtenstein's reinterpretations of Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings: single gets the feeling that something will snap into focus if single steps back just a little further. from one side each painting is done in single one color, the holes in the honeycomb absorb the paint and read as gray or pastel in tone, while the paint that pond s in the slashes has a brighter have feeling The texture gives the paintings a nice vibration.

"La Colmena" (The Hive) consists of 30 works, each 48 inches square, hung in three files of 10 with frames abutting. Seen from afar, each piece has a rippled, milky surface, as well as single or two large blobs in the middle with a kind of calligraphy faintly visible around them. Coming nearer, the viewer notices that the surface is wax, the blebs are circular pieces of beehive beneath the wax, and the dots are bees. Still closer inspection reveals the bees to be builded of paper.

Sicilia makes these works by means of drenching a piece of paper with wax and then placing a honeycomb upon the wax. The paper and toilet-comb are put in a shallow receptacle which will serve as the frame, and a next to the first layer of wax is added. Sicilia then sprinkles in his "bees" and pours a mixture of wax and india ink above the honeycomb to darken it. A final thin layer of wax is then added. While the works are sold separately, their gallery installation formed a single gridlike entity. The lines formed through the "bees" occasionally carried above from one painting to the nearest lending a further visual unity.

Neither science throw out nor freehand painting, these works appear to be to operate in Rauschenberg's famous gap between art and life. Any work in wax carries with it the faculty of perception of fragility and the danger of melting, and the inundation of bees and hive by dint of wax reinforces the threatening humor It's a vestpocket Atlantis.

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