Untitled

Technique

Collage

Dimensions

Dimensions of printed area: 38 x 56 cm (14 15/16 x 22 1/16 in.)

Inventory

FM000269

Description

Sculptor Eduardo Chillida paid special attention to work on paper starting in his student years in Madrid, in the 1940s. Initially, these works were always clean drawings whose line, as Kosme de Barañano has observed, “does not describe but rather formulates” (Eduardo Chillida. Elogio del Hierro, exhib. cat., Valencia, IVAM, Centre Julio González, 1998. p. 21). In the early 1950s, he began cutting papers and creating compositions where the limit of the paper functions as a compositional line and the superimpositions and textures suggest a certain notion of space and volume. In reality, given that in Chillida’s work it is difficult to establish a clear line of continuity between sculpture, relief, collage and drawing, we can say that these compositions reflect a principle similar to the one the sculptor used in the doors of the Basilica of Aránzazu (Guipúzcoa), in 1954. The latter are authentic metallic collages, nearly flat reliefs with superimpositions on wood of forged iron plates with different honing work.

The same concept of plastic construction based on the tension between space and surface can be seen in the untitled collage that concerns us here. In it, pieces of paper are superimposed whose texture and color scheme ambiguously conjure visual qualities both of iron —oxide— and wood, the two materials Chillida was using extensively at the time in sculptural terms. While the pieces of glued paper suggest texture, relief and mass, a vacuum of infinite depth appears behind them, on the uncovered white surface of the paper. In this way, vacuum and mass —elements that are essentially spatial, sculptural— converse on a bidimensional surface. Chillida here questions the limits between the arts and, above all, sheds light on the intense poetics of space (according to the title of the essay by Gaston Bachelard, 1957), which reflect all the artist’s expressive insights.

[María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco]