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Lot Essay
This work is registered in the archives of the Museo Chillida-Leku, under no. CH-1995.013.
Eduardo Chillida's meditations on the nature of infinite space, its temporal and spatial significations, are condensed in the singular statements" "I work to know" (Eduardo Chillida, in "An Interview with Eduardo Chillida," Sandra Wagner, Scultpure Magazine, November, Vol. 16, no. 9,1997, www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/childa/sm-chlda.shtml). Chillida's desire to explore the metaphysical through the physical is stunningly captured in Lo Profundo es el Aire XV of 1995, an immense mass of alabaster, carved by the artist in such a way that light and space penetrate its natural density, opening its interior to luminescence and undermining its seeming physical impenetrability. A transgressive act perhaps, but an act of immense integrity within Chillida's project: from the 1950s onward, the artist strove to explore the dyads of the natural world--density/translucence; gravity/levitation; emptiness/fullness; light/dark; horizontal/vertical--by creating associations between his sculpture and, for example, the vast expanses of sea and sky. Working with alabaster, along with steel and granite in the series of sculptures entitled Lo Profundo es el aire, of which the present work is a part, Chillida makes manifest in the act of carving what he calls the "dialectic between empty and full space" (Ibid.). The title of this work comes from a line in the moving poem by Jorge Guillen, "Más Allá," the first of the poet's Cántico (1936 edition), which in its celebratory vision of the fusion of human life with the natural world, inspired Chillida's boring through solid, an attempt to dissolve the boundary between space and matter.
Chillida, who died in 2002 at age seventy-eight, began to work with alabaster in the 1960s, drawn to the material for its capacity to contain and diffuse light, an effect that was emblematic of the special light found in the Basque country, a "black light," suffused, murky, interior, and which the artist strove to replicate in his works in iron, wood, and steel. Chillida found not only that alabaster had the ability to contain this quality of light, but also that when hewn, it pulled light to it and glowed with an illumination not unlike the dim and somber light of his homeland. Combining a rough-hewn exterior with an almost architecturally conceived interior, Lo Profundo es el Aire XV, represents a frisson of compelling interest to the artist in the duality between nature and constructed spaces, between air and earth, where volume expresses the fact of space residing within. A work that conveys the artist's primary interest in structures and spatial relations, one is reminded of Chillida's early training in architecture at the University of Madrid, his subsequent move to Paris, his travels throughout the Mediterranean, and his return to his homeland--all in an effort to reformulate and re-envision his experiences of the architectonic use of light and space, becoming, as he would say, "an architect of the void" (Ibid.).
Other works in alabaster extend the artist's interest in the physical properties of the material, its receptivity to light, its tactility, and its natural accommodation of interior spaces. The consequence of this interest was a project of extraordinary scale in which he conceived a great cut in Mount Tindaya on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, an obvious outgrowth of the hewn alabaster works. Although rejected by environmentalists and geologist, the idea was to carve out a fifty-meter cube in the mountainside--not unlike that on a smaller scale in the present work--which would then be alternately illuminated by sunlight and moonlight and stand as a symbol of tolerance and harmony, a utopian space for humanity in which people of all races and religion would coexist.
Chillida's vision of "creating a great space inside the mountain" is replicated in the present work in alabaster: it is as if the artist had tunneled into the rock and thereby created a chamber of highly finished internal walls filled with light. Chillida engages, then, in what can be considered a strategy of additive inverses: negative space is hollowed out by the artist within the runic mass as a means of creating a positive entity, a residence for space itself. In contrast to the process of casting, which the artist resisted, Chillida found that carving revealed a further fullness, the presence of space: "I have the sense of the space that is inside the stone; I like to preserve the original form of the block in some way, its roughness, its limits" (D. Brett, Circa Art Magazine, No. 42, October-November, 1988, p. 28). In Lo Profunda es el Aire XV, those naturally roughened limits to space are fully present as is the further duality of a sense of fullness and emptiness within a frame of time, of duration: "I am not a scientist and I am, perhaps, imagining this; but I feel that the full is really the empty and the empty is the solid, travelling very fast. Thus the empty and the full are the same, but at different speeds. ...The limit is the real protagonist of space, just as the present, another limit, is the real protagonist of time" (Ibid., p. 29).
Lo profundo es el Aire XV is a masterful example of the artist's fascination with dualities as they exist in nature and human experience, dyads whose boundaries generate their opposites. This work represents fully the significant issues with which the artist has dealt throughout his oeuvre. In the tensions set up between solid and void, light and dark, and gravitation and levitation, Chillida not only expresses the struggle of polar opposites, but also resolves them into the forceful logic of a unitary field. And yet, beyond the metaphysical ideas that drove him, one senses that his approach and his decisions were entirely intuitive. Indeed, the artist suggested as much: "I believe works conceived a priori are born dead. ...I cannot begin a work until I have, how shall I say it...(he sniffs the air, like a hunting dog)...got the aroma, the scent of the piece" (Ibid., p. 28). The magic of Chillida's Lo profunda es el Aire XV lies in its power to release for our delectation the light and space that inheres in a seemingly inanimate natural form, a transformation carried out by the artist of powerful, even mystical, import.
Eduardo Chillida's meditations on the nature of infinite space, its temporal and spatial significations, are condensed in the singular statements" "I work to know" (Eduardo Chillida, in "An Interview with Eduardo Chillida," Sandra Wagner, Scultpure Magazine, November, Vol. 16, no. 9,1997, www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/childa/sm-chlda.shtml). Chillida's desire to explore the metaphysical through the physical is stunningly captured in Lo Profundo es el Aire XV of 1995, an immense mass of alabaster, carved by the artist in such a way that light and space penetrate its natural density, opening its interior to luminescence and undermining its seeming physical impenetrability. A transgressive act perhaps, but an act of immense integrity within Chillida's project: from the 1950s onward, the artist strove to explore the dyads of the natural world--density/translucence; gravity/levitation; emptiness/fullness; light/dark; horizontal/vertical--by creating associations between his sculpture and, for example, the vast expanses of sea and sky. Working with alabaster, along with steel and granite in the series of sculptures entitled Lo Profundo es el aire, of which the present work is a part, Chillida makes manifest in the act of carving what he calls the "dialectic between empty and full space" (Ibid.). The title of this work comes from a line in the moving poem by Jorge Guillen, "Más Allá," the first of the poet's Cántico (1936 edition), which in its celebratory vision of the fusion of human life with the natural world, inspired Chillida's boring through solid, an attempt to dissolve the boundary between space and matter.
Chillida, who died in 2002 at age seventy-eight, began to work with alabaster in the 1960s, drawn to the material for its capacity to contain and diffuse light, an effect that was emblematic of the special light found in the Basque country, a "black light," suffused, murky, interior, and which the artist strove to replicate in his works in iron, wood, and steel. Chillida found not only that alabaster had the ability to contain this quality of light, but also that when hewn, it pulled light to it and glowed with an illumination not unlike the dim and somber light of his homeland. Combining a rough-hewn exterior with an almost architecturally conceived interior, Lo Profundo es el Aire XV, represents a frisson of compelling interest to the artist in the duality between nature and constructed spaces, between air and earth, where volume expresses the fact of space residing within. A work that conveys the artist's primary interest in structures and spatial relations, one is reminded of Chillida's early training in architecture at the University of Madrid, his subsequent move to Paris, his travels throughout the Mediterranean, and his return to his homeland--all in an effort to reformulate and re-envision his experiences of the architectonic use of light and space, becoming, as he would say, "an architect of the void" (Ibid.).
Other works in alabaster extend the artist's interest in the physical properties of the material, its receptivity to light, its tactility, and its natural accommodation of interior spaces. The consequence of this interest was a project of extraordinary scale in which he conceived a great cut in Mount Tindaya on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, an obvious outgrowth of the hewn alabaster works. Although rejected by environmentalists and geologist, the idea was to carve out a fifty-meter cube in the mountainside--not unlike that on a smaller scale in the present work--which would then be alternately illuminated by sunlight and moonlight and stand as a symbol of tolerance and harmony, a utopian space for humanity in which people of all races and religion would coexist.
Chillida's vision of "creating a great space inside the mountain" is replicated in the present work in alabaster: it is as if the artist had tunneled into the rock and thereby created a chamber of highly finished internal walls filled with light. Chillida engages, then, in what can be considered a strategy of additive inverses: negative space is hollowed out by the artist within the runic mass as a means of creating a positive entity, a residence for space itself. In contrast to the process of casting, which the artist resisted, Chillida found that carving revealed a further fullness, the presence of space: "I have the sense of the space that is inside the stone; I like to preserve the original form of the block in some way, its roughness, its limits" (D. Brett, Circa Art Magazine, No. 42, October-November, 1988, p. 28). In Lo Profunda es el Aire XV, those naturally roughened limits to space are fully present as is the further duality of a sense of fullness and emptiness within a frame of time, of duration: "I am not a scientist and I am, perhaps, imagining this; but I feel that the full is really the empty and the empty is the solid, travelling very fast. Thus the empty and the full are the same, but at different speeds. ...The limit is the real protagonist of space, just as the present, another limit, is the real protagonist of time" (Ibid., p. 29).
Lo profundo es el Aire XV is a masterful example of the artist's fascination with dualities as they exist in nature and human experience, dyads whose boundaries generate their opposites. This work represents fully the significant issues with which the artist has dealt throughout his oeuvre. In the tensions set up between solid and void, light and dark, and gravitation and levitation, Chillida not only expresses the struggle of polar opposites, but also resolves them into the forceful logic of a unitary field. And yet, beyond the metaphysical ideas that drove him, one senses that his approach and his decisions were entirely intuitive. Indeed, the artist suggested as much: "I believe works conceived a priori are born dead. ...I cannot begin a work until I have, how shall I say it...(he sniffs the air, like a hunting dog)...got the aroma, the scent of the piece" (Ibid., p. 28). The magic of Chillida's Lo profunda es el Aire XV lies in its power to release for our delectation the light and space that inheres in a seemingly inanimate natural form, a transformation carried out by the artist of powerful, even mystical, import.