Maria Bolaños. Professor of Art History at the University of Valladolid and former director of the National Museum of Sculpture
It is not strange that the artist who resists being current, resisting easy success, is precisely the one who best embodies the spirit of his time. This is what happens with Eduardo Chillidawho, in 1948, settled in the bustling post-war Paris, where he immersed himself in galleries, conversations and museums to, three years later, abandon that cosmopolitan life, unsubscribe from all the magazines and seclude himself in a Hernani forge trying to illuminate an art immune to all kinship, naive, new and meditated, of which he himself was completely ignorant.
From this gesture of independence and isolation came the idea, almost the legend, of an uncontaminated Chillida, deaf to the world, timeless, without context. But this is a relative truth. As Michel Seuphor said, there is no workshop, no matter how walled it may be, where what is being done and said in other places does not infiltrate. And Chillida, who knew how to give his sculpture an undeniably personal accentdemonstrated his own vibrant genius despite the influences, thanks to the influences, crossed by the influences.
What His ambitions intersect with those of so many other contemporaries, This is proven by the very fact of his vocation, which awakens at the same time that sculpture is reborn with great ambition in Europe and America, converted into a new and radical art, the most necessary expressive medium, the one that best tuned with a society that, fragile Even due to the devastation of the war, he asked for an art to cling to, more tangible and firm.
Resisting outside incitements is impossible. And Chillida demonstrated his own vibrant genius crossed by the influences
Sculpture then imposes itself by asserting its physical rotundity, its constructive intelligence, its naked poverty, its gravity, its capacity to humanize the aesthetic field. In that environment, the voices of Alberto Giacometti, Barbara Hepworth, David Smith, Germaine Richier or the young Chillida, with their personal accents, will resonate powerfully with a work that, full of introspection and existentialism, embodied the desire to return to a mythical, ahistorical time, to recover the primordial of humanity.
The sculptor shares that magnetic field of artists who, without being inspired by each other, outline what “is in the air” of the time, in all its variety. For example, one of the keys of those decades will be the will to exalt raw matter, in which he investigates iron and fire – like so many sculptors-blacksmiths –, while, for his part, Dubuffet dedicates himself to the rehabilitation of clay or Beuys probes the energy of natural substances. Or, on a formal level, the exploration of space, the great challenge that the artists of the fifties and sixties will face, is a fixed idea of Chillida, but also of Lucio Fontana, Buckminster Fuller or Lygia Clark.
He is not alone either in his admiration for the mystics or for Zen Buddhism, which had permeated an artistic community – from Tàpies or Yves Klein to John Cage –, modeled by Eastern spiritualism and eager for silence, emptiness and not-knowing.
Or, finally, by asserting the beauty of black lights, Chillida joins with that trail of black cultivators, which talents as disparate as Soulages, Reinhardt or the New York expressionists will defend as the most urgent way of embodying the essential.
The Forge of Space
Víctor Gómez Pin. Philosopher and Chair emeritus of the UAB. Last book: The Spain we loved so much (Arpa, 2022)
The artisan aspect of Aristotle’s technites designates a being who knows the causes, knows, for example, the topological structure of the materials he works with, as well as their density, their resistance, the spectrum of their possible forms, starting with their metamorphic potentiality. … everything that Eduardo Chilida was very attentive to.
This knowledge potentially leads to greater questions of the spirit, specifically related to space: As a final stage, Art and space (common book by Chillida and Heidegger), but to begin with… science and space.
Chillida part of the observation of matter and, faithful to the nature of each material, explores what it makes possible without disturbing it (since nature allows itself to be revealed, but never violated), to reach extraordinary conclusions in relation to the very bond between matter and space, conclusions that become a kind of intuitive non-Euclidean geometer. I will give two examples.
Chillida part of the observation of matter and explores what
this makes it possible without disturbing it to reach extraordinary conclusions
Euclid’s postulate: all right angles are equal. Chillida’s disagreement: “I never fall for a right angle because the concrete response to a right angle is a different right angle.” This not falling at a right angle is almost a corollary of another maxim of the sculptor, “every plane is twisted.”
With it he expressed his deep intuition that, no matter how much it may seem otherwise, there is no plane that does not have curvature, which means that all three-dimensional space is curved, issues that put in the way of the non-intuitive geometry that supports the relativistic physics, geometry, which would be illustrated in his own work: “you’ll see it!” he said.
That Eduardo Chillida asked us to see what cannot be seen, but in any case conceptualized through formulas, is for me one of the mysteries of this admirable technites. So much for Chillida forgeron, whose exploration of matter puts him on the path to the questions of the scientific spirit.
But The greatest amazement lies in that singular and irreducible capacity of his by which he forges a form in accordance with the exploration of the potentialities of nature. (in the case of Chillida the virtualities of stone and iron), results in what we call sculpture.
Well, just as in the virtuosity of the pianist, his mastery of the instrument is not enough to provoke the rise of the audience from their seats, and the mutual congratulations for the shared emotion – it is not exactly the forging of iron, which makes the people of San Sebastian come closer to wind comb with the common feeling of magnetic attraction with which human beings approach the sea. “Art, the authentically real, sober school of life and true final judgment,” wrote Marcel Proust.
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2024-01-10 01:38:59
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