This article explains how this sculptor, whom poet Gabriel Celaya calls “The Engineer of Dreams”, developed his relationship with concrete.
In 1947 Chillida abandoned his degree in Architecture to begin drawing lessons at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The following year he moved to Paris, where he began his artistic path. He made his first iron sculpture in 1951 (Ilarik) and this material would predominate in his work, which he exhibited in 1956 in his first solo exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in the city with which he has always been associated ever since. .
On the occasion of this exhibition, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), to whom the artist dedicated a sculpture, published the magazine Le Cosmos de Fer (Iron Cosmos, published in Spanish) in the Maeght gallery’s Derrière le Miroir magazine. The Right to Dream, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1985). A man with a deep scientific education but also an exquisite sensitivity to poetry and literature, he left foundational texts that teach us to understand how we relate to matter in a process that goes beyond the physical world. intuition, daydreaming, and the unconscious in what he calls “material imagination.”
Chillida, who has always been interested in the relationship between science and art, found in this philosopher an interlocutor whom he admired: In his introductory speech to the San Academy of Fine Arts, he asked “What is the fundamental difference between science and art?” asked. Fernando (Questions, 1994). In his comments and writings about his works, thoughts on concepts such as matter, measure, limit, space, gravity, weight, density, size, accuracy, speed constantly emerge, and references to space and time always come to the fore: «Space is a brother, the twin of time. ” he continued. With his works, Chillida enters into a physics that has its own laws: “The problem is broader than a physical law. I secretly rebel against Newton. Me and my sculptures. I used weight a lot to rebel against weight” and focus on qualitative rather than quantitative with a geometry: “Greece teaches us that qualitative perfection is different from geometric accuracy.”
Eyebrow
In The Iron Cosmos, Bachelard told us how the sculptor “tells the iron what he cannot tell the stone, that the stone is not muscle, that it is mass.” The presence of iron is entirely muscle. Chillida wants to know the muscle area. Throw away the chisel and mallet. Take the tongs and the blacksmith’s hammer. “This is how the sculptor became a blacksmith.” Years later, Chillida would discover a material that combines mass and muscle, stone and iron: reinforced concrete.
Chillida made his first reinforced concrete sculpture in 1972, under the overpass of Juan Bravo Street, after a meeting with civil engineer José A. Fernández Ordóñez, who asked him to contribute a work for the Castellana museum of abstract sculpture in Madrid. The engineer had designed it together with his friend, Alicante artist Eusebio Sempere. Among the works on display will be donations made to the people of Madrid by different Spanish artists such as Julio González and Alberto Sánchez (both died in exile), Ribera, Serrano, Chillida, Sempere. . The aim of this museum was to establish a permanent dialogue between engineering and art, technique and artistic work, contributing to overcoming the duality between functionality and beauty that was always present in the thought and practice of the engineer Fernández Ordóñez, who built beautiful bridges. With technical collaboration, Chillida would construct a series of large-scale reinforced concrete sculptures; the best known of these include The Meeting Place in the Castellana in Madrid III (1972); Goethe’s House, Frankfurt (1986); Guren Aitaren Etxea, Guernica (1987) and Tribute to Horizon IV in Gijón (1989).
With Castellana’s concrete sculpture, Meeting Place III, Chillida will have to confront a material unknown to him. With this he approaches the world of engineering: “Because my work, my steels and their stresses, my concretes and their stresses, my concretes and their densities, has always been very close to difficult engineering projects” (Thinking Engineering, José A. Fernández Ordóñez / Jose R. Navarro Vera , Faculty of Civil Engineers Fundación Juanelo Turriano, Madrid, 2009).
Concrete is an artificial stone formed as a result of mixing and hardening of five basic components: cement, aggregate, sand, additives and water. We need to talk about concrete rather than concrete because when these components come together, we obtain hundreds of types of concrete. Reinforced concrete is achieved by placing a reinforcement of steel rods inside the mass so that the entire structure supports the loads between the two materials.
Chillida concrete is a very special, non-technical material, one of the features that the sculptor wanted his concrete to show was that it would age over time, which required controlling the water-cement ratio, type and color of the concrete. add aggregates or additives such as iron filings, among others. Fernández Ordóñez said of these concretes: “This concrete takes on a different nature, it has a density not seen on record: just as a bad statue can turn bronze into a soft material, or in some Greek statues the carbonate of calcium disappears, giving way to a hidden, transparent, eternal stone of music.” leaves; “This concrete has a mass subject to still unknown laws of gravity, a resistance not measured in kilograms per square centimeter but rather akin to the great boxers in boxing history.”
Dialogue with the void
Why did Chillida hang the statue of Castellana, which weighs more than six tons and appears to be flying with its wings spread, on the four pillars of the overpass? As I said before, Chillida envisioned a physical universe with its own laws. The dialogue between full and empty takes place between matter and void, two very similar things, she said. He said that one day, while he was working in the workshop where he was forging metal parts, he saw how a crane lifted a huge weight, which he perceived as a void above it, and at the same time tried to push it towards the ground along with the void. What was underneath supported him: «Concrete represented support for everything I wanted to do, precisely because of its density and strength, but never flying. That’s what I liked and what interested me. This is how the Meeting Place under the Castellana bridge appeared. “It was an irrational battle against gravity, a massive vertical battle between ascending forces and descending forces.” (In Praise of the Horizon. Conversations with Eduardo Chillida, Susana Chillida, ed. Destino, 2003.)
All of Chillida’s reinforced concrete sculptures are located in public spaces: «One of the things that fascinates me about sculpture is works that belong to everyone (…) The power to be in such direct contact with the public and the street». In the Castellana museum, your work is not only the protagonist of the museum space, but also the piece that creates that space and transforms it into a place. The statue Praise of the Horizon IV, erected on the Santa Catalina hill in the city of Gijón, is probably the work that most clearly embodies the sculptor’s view of space, which he felt was an existential experience rather than a physical one. This sculpture can be considered as the sculpture that marks the culmination of his series of concrete works. He said: “I think this is the best job I’ve ever done.”
For Chillida, the choice of location for the outdoor sculpture was very important because its location opens up possibilities of engaging with the environment and the universe. The work created a place that did not exist before its presence on the site; He shared this idea with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom the author collaborated to illustrate his work Die Kunst under Raum (Art and Space, 1969). It is dedicated to the sculptor and we read: «The interrelationship between art and space must be considered through the experience of space and environment (…) Sculpture will be the concretization of space, the opening and allowing of an environment. It gathers the free within itself, which gives permanence to everything and gives man a dwelling in the midst of things.” (Art and space, Heidegger, Edit. Herder, 2015)
border and horizon
In Praise of the Horizon, the prominent part of the space is the sea horizon, which is also present in the artist’s gaze, as in San Sebastián Wind Comb (1977). Designed as an architectural space, the 10-meter-high and circular-planned sculpture opens like a porch to the horizon, which Chillida sees as “the border without borders”, and connects people to the horizon. A limit that gets farther and farther away as you get closer, and within which you can go around the Earth trying to reach it, so for the sculptor “the horizon is the homeland of humanity.”
Eduardo Chillida’s work and thought teach us to reflect on his work, which for him are questions that the artist asks himself and asks us: “I am after things that I do not understand, I want to know what I do not know.” He mentioned that he preferred Eugen Herrigel’s The Zen of Archery (Gaia editions, 2022), which was recommended to him by his friend, the cubist painter Braque, and it was said here that the important thing to hit the target is to reach it. getting rid of desire, hitting the target. Maybe there is no answer to the question we ask ourselves when we encounter a work of art, because this would mean revealing its secret and then it would lose all its magic. Thus true works of art, like Chillida’s sculptures, always remain, are eternal.