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An artist of great charm, José D'Apice never resorts to the lure of fascination as an end in itself. Although animated by an intensely "romantic" impulse for the unlimited, the indefinite, the indeterminate, for nature as an infinite enveloping body, he never entrusts the meaning to an ineffable, confused emanation. By creating incisive and clear images, however surreal - images that do not disdain to make their own the effectiveness of an iconography in some ways similar to the powerful and immediate synthesis of certain ex-voto paintings - this artist seems to want to express an absolute experience, and therefore mythical, of space, in which the human presence is transformed into a suggestive heraldic apparition. The art of José D'Apice - rich in conceptual and symbolic knots of literary and philosophical origin - thus expresses a new, current experience of the sublime: the silence and darkening of nature coinciding with its showing itself; the establishment and transcendence of the image, in a coexistence of "relative" abstractionism and "relative" figurativism.

José D'Apice delves into the labyrinths of the soul, to seek the dark roots of life: in his work we can read the journey of Western art of the past century, its oscillation between reality and prophecy, between anguish and dream, between scream and lyrical abandon, between vision and blindness. The unity of his path is not certainty but the dissemination of fragments, the emergence of enigmas, the revelation of ambiguity, which is already expressed in his pictorial technique, sophisticated but at the same time aimed at the elementary purity of an origin.

Baudelaire wrote, regarding Delacroix, that the "completed" has nothing to do with the "finished". Thus the completeness of José D'Apice's works is inseparable from their being alien to any idea of re-finishing, in their capture of the metamorphoses of the material in progress. The synthesis of the sign suggests a minimal gap between thought and pictorial rendering, a rapidity of execution ready to fix an elusive thought enclosed in the gesture (one thinks with the hands, Heidegger said), a powerful and ephemeral image, a reflection of light on the dark wall of matter.

D'Apice's chromatic universe is the result of an austere limitation that transforms into the possibility of unprecedented, intense coloristic emotions: the alchemical, unfathomable depths of black; the absolute light of white; the warm and vibrant emotion of red, yellow, gold.

His pictorial sign belongs to a desiring "writing" that gives life to a game of contrasts, conceptual and at the same time exquisitely perceptive: weight / lightness, opacity / transparency, color / non-colour, density / rarefaction, alternation of strong density of the matter -color and diaphanous chromatic veils.

A thematic key to José D'Apice's work is in fact also the rarefaction, the dialectic of the line with the void: «making-space» is also a «making-empty»: «the form is precisely the void; emptiness is precisely the form", sounds a beautiful maxim from the Heirdaya Sutra. The void as absolute "white", the void as the spiritual breath of space.