The Christopher Cutts Gallery is excited to present “Phrases,” featuring a new body of work by internationally acclaimed Spanish painter, José Manuel Ciria, known in the art world simply as Ciria.
Ciria’s reputation and painting practice are characterized by his muscular, large-format abstract compositions. However, Ciria imbues every work, regardless of scale, with the energy and confidence of a master artist working within the rich historical milieu of Spain, embodying a long tradition of artistic excellence.
This exhibition, “Phrases,” presents a new collection of small-format mixed-media collages, with one large-scale work. The accompanying publication also features an insightful essay by art critic Gary Michael Dault, discussing this new body of work.
“Where the big Cirias of the Cirian past leapt like wild animals — they are all remarkably centrifugal in their effects — the small, often rather spare and even severe collage works are, by contrast, studies in the centripetal. Which is to say that where the big paintings push out into space, the small collages work in precisely the opposite way, inviting the viewer into what feels like a private and, of necessity, intimate viewing of what is presumably important to the artist at present.
What happens if a full-throated flame of colour is end-stopped by the imposition of, for example, one of the boundaries of a Ciria collage, a stern edge, a resolute length of framing? Will the flame be extinguished by this new confinement, or will it burn all the hotter by being compressed?”
Join us for the opening reception of “Phrases” this Saturday, May 16, from 2 to 6 pm. The artist will be in attendance, and catalogues will be available for pre-order!
We look forward to seeing you then!
ABOUT JOSÉ M CIRIA
José Manuel Ciria is an outstanding artist of his generation and a key figure in the heterogeneous panorama of Spanish painting of the last three decades. Since 1984, when he had his first solo show at the Ferrière gallery in Paris, Ciria has developed a broad career and has been honoured with numerous awards and exhibitions. He has gained international recognition through solo exhibitions at notable institutions throughout Europe and the Americas.
Concerning Ciria’s work, the influential American critic Donald Kuspit has said, “I would venture to say that José Manuel Ciria is a great painter. And by that I mean that he’s got complete command of his medium and his tools; paint and both the gestural and the geometric vocabulary of modernist abstraction… We can clearly see a strong element of fantasy in Ciria’s paintings, as his figures show. Perhaps he could be called an abstract illusionist, in the sense that he creates fantastic figures out of abstract elements, which are usually gestural planes that appear to be in constant movement that thus suggest a figure in the midst of a metaphoric process.”
