In praise of Chillida - Poetics of matter

Although abstract, the work of Eduardo Chillida (1924–2002) avoids both the purely geometric idealism of formal abstraction and the materialism of raw abstraction.

It aims neither at a stable, timeless reality transcending nature and its evolution, nor at the depths of primal chaos.

Rather, it charts a course between these two extremes and uncovers a world – the very one we inhabit – that is at once foreign and familiar, transformed and yet recognisable. Yet this world is not primarily one of things, but of the elements (light, fire, water, air), a true natural alphabet in which our existence is inscribed, between heaven and earth.

If the artist transforms matter, it is not in order to escape it, but to liberate a new face and a new resonance from it, to let it dream. It is thus, as Bachelard put it, that the external materialism of scientific and technical thought gives way to the dreamy materialism of art, and that levitation prevails over gravity.