Alfonco Sicilia Sobrino

as_2 Beauty does not always come from within

The life of the artist is subtle and complex
and the work that emerges from it will logically
give rise to such variegated emotions that
words will not be able to convey them.
Vassily Kandinsky



Carl Gustav Jung, the psychiatric doctor, psychologist and essayist born in Switzerland in 1875, was the founder of the school of analytical psychology and the inventor of the notion of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, which alienated him from Sigmund Freud, with whom he collaborated during his early years of research. Jung believed that the collective unconscious1 is like a biological memory of the repeated experiences of humanity; without realising it, we are capable of reproducing certain elements that are embedded in everyone’s memory because they have been seen or transmitted throughout history.

These images are activated unconsciously in certain situations and are there in the mind, shared with all other humans from every time and place in the world.
Jung made a distinction between “symbol” and “sign”: a symbol being a word or image that represents something more than its immediate, obvious meaning. The symbol transmits an unconscious aspect that is not precisely defined, and nor do we expect it to be, but part of our brain recovers an idea that has remained innate in our mind and which we can associate with other images, with which it then takes on a meaning. He believed that a sign is an image or word with an obvious meaning and which is not associated with any other idea than the one it transmits.
For Jung, the mythological figures or deeds which have been passed down through oral or written tradition – dragons and other fantastical creatures, geometrical shapes like circles, triangles, squares and other symbols – can be found in the collective unconscious and come into our consciousness without us being capable of interpreting them; they are simply there, and in their different guises they flow through each moment of our lives.
We are mentioning the collective unconscious because the paintings of Alfonso Sicilia Sobrino are related to the definition of this concept that Jung has given us. His abstract paintings, full of geometric shapes (which have been a feature of his work ever since he started out), his lines of diagonal colours that criss-cross and superimpose themselves, sometimes forming complex tangled networks that are difficult to follow; his combinations of gorgeous colours that make his paintings glossy and attractive, are all present in some of the objects that we might have used or seen not so long ago.
We can thus associate the way he paints his pictures with some of the embellishments that used to be used on American motorcars at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, some of which were later replicated on many of the buses we see on the roads today – stains of metallic colour spattered on a backdrop of diagonal lines which extend down the whole length of the vehicle.
Many of us will remember those cars of the Seventies which were painted in two colours: one dominant colour with a central line that grew diagonally towards the boot with a combination such as red and white, green and white, etc. These designs, which were echoed an infinitum in some television series, still serve as a template for decorating some of the tuning cars we still see today, and are still absolutely contemporary.
This is why it would not be far-fetched to think that this conjunction of coloured lines, of diagonals that suddenly turn round upon themselves, of brilliant stars and rectangular shapes, are there in the mind of their author because unconsciously he is influenced by all the decorative effects that we have seen repeated on television, at the cinema or simply in adverts, and which help to make his paintings recognisable through our own association of ideas, as these kinds of symbols are shared by a collective.
This pictorial design of automobiles is not only present in the author’s work; he is also an admirer of industrial design, certain architectural forms, which can even be clearly identified in some of his works, and the rounded design of organic shapes serves to establish similarities with his work2.

The disorder behind apparent beauty

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