CHILLIDA: THE SAHPING OF METAL

The long history of human affaire has rarely been disturbed by the invention of new techniques. Yet those techniques are so epoch-making that we still mark the evolution of society by such conquests: the Iron Age, bronze age and so on.

Now as regards sculpture, the twentieth century has brought new possibilities of construction in space, including assemblage and iron. The two, moreover, converge, with welded or wrought iron proving to be the most durable and resistant form of the assemblage. At the source of these new artistic practices is one and the same creator: Picasso. It was around 1930 that, with the aid of Julio Gonzalez, Picasso executed his first iron constructions, but it was not until the fifties that the metal made itself the area of choice for experimentation in modern sculpture.

The introduction of iron created wholly new sculptural possibilities by favouring other forms of equilibrium, by playing freely with space and by allowing the physical reality of the finished piece to display the marks of the work that went into it: the burn of the fire which deformed the mass of matter, the scar left by the hammer that crushed it on the anvil, the welding joints that sealed together the heterogeneity of the components.

Organized in 1955 at the Kunsthalle in Berne by Arnold Rüdlinger, Eisenplastik was the first show to take a comprehensive look at the history of this method of construction in space which was tempting an ever-growing number of sculptors, to the point of becoming prevailing practice. There the work of the young Spaniard Eduardo Chillida was much noticed.

Of Basque origin, Chillida had studied architecture in Madrid before going to sculpture. Several sojourns in Paris put him in touch with modern art, and he gradually turned away from figurative representation. His first iron piece dates from 1951; Ilarik was achieved with the help of the blacksmith of Hernani, where he had just settled. It was a revelation for him, and he set up a forge at his own residence. Iron convinced him that he had “to leave a pleasant land, in which all results seemed valid, to undertake a dangerous journey to the unknown.” “Iron,” said his friend Claude Esteban, “the kind of work it entailed, showed Chillida the very thing granite falsified: the approach to and confrontation of space by way of a dynamic force in which the ductility of the material and the strong purpose that shapes it are combined.” In 1958 he received the sculpture prize of the Venice Biennale for a body of work that was already abundant and fundamental, and no longer had anything to do with the work of the pioneers. Chillida demonstrated the meaning of the work by exploring the equilibriums that metal made possible with an undreamt-of freedom.

Working in wrought, then welded iron turned him away from the concept of mass by offering him new relations between construction and space: his assemblages embarked on the conquest of the air. His first works were still inspired by the form of the craftsman’s and peasant’s articles of ordinary use, but he transposed them poetically nto empty space, attaching them by a single fixed point to the ground of the pedestal, from which the radiated in manifold directions. Combing space, clawing the wind he defied the laws of statics. From the outset Chillida recognized the demands and possibilities of metal, which was rendered supple and malleable by its passage through fire, but which also retained the marks of the blows that shaped it, of the force that twisted it. This physical presence of work of which the finished piece kept the imprint and which made it possible to measure in imagination the time and effect of the process of elaboration would assume great importance in contemporary creation.

Working with tubes or bars, Chillida found that they divided up space. The core of matter was replaced by emptiness; the mass by air; but air was all the more meaningful in that Chillida, as a good craftsman, developed his forms by following their growth: “I start the work with the heart. The heart is like the first seed. As soon as it begins to beat, it works with me. So I am no longer alone. It has its own driving force, and I feed it with my gestures; I help it to live. The work can begin to develop.” Creation is a combat with and against matter, a confrontation with the elements: fire and water.

Chillida´s forms abandon verticality to develop like knotted and forceful calligraphs. Refusing to let himself be guided by the technical know-how he had rapidly acquired, in 1956 Chillida turned to a thicker material which he twisted or unwound, but which kept in its folds the violence that bent it to the sculptor’s will. Dream Anvils were both lyrical metaphors and labyrinths built from a space which he described. Strengthened by this experience as an ironsmith, Chillida was able, starting in 1958, to attempt other materials such as wood, which allowed him to work on a larger scale, while affirming once more that “sculpture is in solidarity with what revolves around it.” He was to carry over this experience with metal into alabaster and granite, compact materials which react to light, that light which steel and later Cor-Ten (rusted) steel would lead him to prefer in more serene architectural compositions where the impact of gesture vanished in the continuity of spirals, drawing the spectator inward to the hollowed-out centre of the heart. These knots of metal opened onto the mystery of the infinite and the void. Chillida became the builder of the Invisible.