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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under no. 1998.007.
'The sculptures do not attempt to encompass the interior space...they are blocks of transparency in which the form becomes space, and the space dissolves in oscillations of light. Between the forms and the empty space...there is a relationship which is very difficult to express with words. That which one cannot say, the unspeakable, is pure space, without qualities and without limits.'
(O. Paz, ' Vom Eisen zum Licht' in Eduardo Chillida - Skulpturen, exh. cat., Hanover, 1981, p. 21 quoted in Chillida 1948-98, exh. cat., Madrid, 1998, p. 86)
Carved into a vast block of translucent alabaster in such a way that it poetically explores and demonstrates the conceptual penetration of solid material by light and space, Lo profundo es el aire XX (How Profound is the Air XX) is one of Chillida's finest works. One of only a handful of alabaster works on this scale, it is a masterly sculptural expression of a theme that would ultimately lead to his greatest and most ambitious project - the Tindaya Project in Fuerteventura. This bold block of solid stone, radiating with light and space from within, is an extraordinarily eloquent manifestion of Chillida's concept of his sculpture as an 'architecture' of the 'void'.
Executed in 1998, Lo profundo es el aire XX belongs to a major series of sculptures that take their name from a line in the poem Más Alla' by Jorge Guillen a poet from the generation of '27 and close friend of Chillida's. Reading, Soy, más, estoy. Respiro. Lo profundo es el aire. La realidad me inventa,Soy su leyenda. Salve!, (I am; I am here and now. I breathe the deepest air. Reality invents me. I am its legend. Hail!), the relevant verse appears to articulate the symbiotic relationship between existence, time, material reality and the seeming nothingness of the air. As Chillida must have recognised, it is a verse that describes perfectly the central aesthetic of his own work with its preoccupation with articulating the almost mystical relationship between space and material.
In the series of works that he named Lo profundo es el aire, Chillida explored questions of time, space and material in a variety of very different media that included, steel, alabaster and granite. Each of these works deliberately established a visual dialogue between the solidity, texture and rigidity of the material and its infusion by empty space in such a way that a lyrical contrast and almost fluid penetration of one by the other was expressed by the work as a whole.
It was in 1965 that Chillida first began to work with alabaster and in this work, as in other series of alabaster sculptures, Elogio de la luz, Elogio a la arquitectura, Homenaje a la mar and Homenaje a Goethe for example, the key element is this unique stone's ability to express and convey a sense of interior or 'inherent light' seemingly pulsing within the material itself. Chillida often referred to this kind of inner light as a 'black light', which, innate within the material, was clearly distinguishable from the outer light of the pure marble, plaster and sunlight of the Mediterranean cultures. It was a 'dark' or 'black' understood and indeed recognized by the Basques, the Bretons, Galicians, and the English and Irish cultures of the Atlantic Coast.
It is this concept of light inhabiting or residing within the form and the material of his sculptures themselves that, as the poet Octavio Paz has so eloquently pointed out, Chillida's alabaster works explore and invoke. And it is through his use of alabaster in particular that Chillida best expresses his concept of an innate space residing within material itself in the form of light. It is for this reason, for instance, that one of his series of alabaster sculptures was dedicated to Wolfgang Goethe whose theories on light Chillida much admired.
In later alabaster sculptures, like Lo profundo es el aire XX, Chillida's sculptural concentration tended to focus also on light being directed from outside into the thick material interior of the work - a kind of visual demonstration of the mystic potential of light to penetrate and give new form to apparently inert, solid matter through the swift and mysterious medium of emptiness, or space. This was a pronounced tendency in these works that ultimately led to Chillida's developing the ambitious concept for the great and ongoing Tindaya project in Fuerteventura where a vast cube (of space and light) was to be hollowed out in a mountain (Mount Tindaya) and illuminated with shafts of light from outside. It was to be a 50 metre cube pierced with two openings in the mountain, one for sunlight and another for moonlight, each admitting light to the heart of the mountain by either day or night. Symbolic of the meeting place between solid and void, this spatial cube would, he hoped, provide a neutral meeting place for people to congregate, detached from the burden of all their cultural and religious backgrounds.
'Many years ago I had an intuition which I really thought was utopian. To create a space inside a mountain that would offer men and women of all races and colours a great sculpture dedicated to tolerance. One day the possibility arose to realize the sculpture in Mount Tindaya, on Fuerteventura, the mountain where the utopia could become a reality. The sculpture would help protect the sacred mountain. The giant space carved out of the mountain wouldn't be visible from the outside. But anyone who penetrated her heart would be able to see sunlight and moonlight inside a mountain that overlooks the sea, the horizon, a mountain that is unreachable, necessary, non-existent.' (Chillida, quoted at www.museochillidaleku.com/Mount-Tindaya)
'The sculptures do not attempt to encompass the interior space...they are blocks of transparency in which the form becomes space, and the space dissolves in oscillations of light. Between the forms and the empty space...there is a relationship which is very difficult to express with words. That which one cannot say, the unspeakable, is pure space, without qualities and without limits.'
(O. Paz, ' Vom Eisen zum Licht' in Eduardo Chillida - Skulpturen, exh. cat., Hanover, 1981, p. 21 quoted in Chillida 1948-98, exh. cat., Madrid, 1998, p. 86)
Carved into a vast block of translucent alabaster in such a way that it poetically explores and demonstrates the conceptual penetration of solid material by light and space, Lo profundo es el aire XX (How Profound is the Air XX) is one of Chillida's finest works. One of only a handful of alabaster works on this scale, it is a masterly sculptural expression of a theme that would ultimately lead to his greatest and most ambitious project - the Tindaya Project in Fuerteventura. This bold block of solid stone, radiating with light and space from within, is an extraordinarily eloquent manifestion of Chillida's concept of his sculpture as an 'architecture' of the 'void'.
Executed in 1998, Lo profundo es el aire XX belongs to a major series of sculptures that take their name from a line in the poem Más Alla' by Jorge Guillen a poet from the generation of '27 and close friend of Chillida's. Reading, Soy, más, estoy. Respiro. Lo profundo es el aire. La realidad me inventa,Soy su leyenda. Salve!, (I am; I am here and now. I breathe the deepest air. Reality invents me. I am its legend. Hail!), the relevant verse appears to articulate the symbiotic relationship between existence, time, material reality and the seeming nothingness of the air. As Chillida must have recognised, it is a verse that describes perfectly the central aesthetic of his own work with its preoccupation with articulating the almost mystical relationship between space and material.
In the series of works that he named Lo profundo es el aire, Chillida explored questions of time, space and material in a variety of very different media that included, steel, alabaster and granite. Each of these works deliberately established a visual dialogue between the solidity, texture and rigidity of the material and its infusion by empty space in such a way that a lyrical contrast and almost fluid penetration of one by the other was expressed by the work as a whole.
It was in 1965 that Chillida first began to work with alabaster and in this work, as in other series of alabaster sculptures, Elogio de la luz, Elogio a la arquitectura, Homenaje a la mar and Homenaje a Goethe for example, the key element is this unique stone's ability to express and convey a sense of interior or 'inherent light' seemingly pulsing within the material itself. Chillida often referred to this kind of inner light as a 'black light', which, innate within the material, was clearly distinguishable from the outer light of the pure marble, plaster and sunlight of the Mediterranean cultures. It was a 'dark' or 'black' understood and indeed recognized by the Basques, the Bretons, Galicians, and the English and Irish cultures of the Atlantic Coast.
It is this concept of light inhabiting or residing within the form and the material of his sculptures themselves that, as the poet Octavio Paz has so eloquently pointed out, Chillida's alabaster works explore and invoke. And it is through his use of alabaster in particular that Chillida best expresses his concept of an innate space residing within material itself in the form of light. It is for this reason, for instance, that one of his series of alabaster sculptures was dedicated to Wolfgang Goethe whose theories on light Chillida much admired.
In later alabaster sculptures, like Lo profundo es el aire XX, Chillida's sculptural concentration tended to focus also on light being directed from outside into the thick material interior of the work - a kind of visual demonstration of the mystic potential of light to penetrate and give new form to apparently inert, solid matter through the swift and mysterious medium of emptiness, or space. This was a pronounced tendency in these works that ultimately led to Chillida's developing the ambitious concept for the great and ongoing Tindaya project in Fuerteventura where a vast cube (of space and light) was to be hollowed out in a mountain (Mount Tindaya) and illuminated with shafts of light from outside. It was to be a 50 metre cube pierced with two openings in the mountain, one for sunlight and another for moonlight, each admitting light to the heart of the mountain by either day or night. Symbolic of the meeting place between solid and void, this spatial cube would, he hoped, provide a neutral meeting place for people to congregate, detached from the burden of all their cultural and religious backgrounds.
'Many years ago I had an intuition which I really thought was utopian. To create a space inside a mountain that would offer men and women of all races and colours a great sculpture dedicated to tolerance. One day the possibility arose to realize the sculpture in Mount Tindaya, on Fuerteventura, the mountain where the utopia could become a reality. The sculpture would help protect the sacred mountain. The giant space carved out of the mountain wouldn't be visible from the outside. But anyone who penetrated her heart would be able to see sunlight and moonlight inside a mountain that overlooks the sea, the horizon, a mountain that is unreachable, necessary, non-existent.' (Chillida, quoted at www.museochillidaleku.com/Mount-Tindaya)