The Northern Idea. Alicia Chillida, Benito Macías Cantón

"Water, in truth, does not reflect the sky but because my spirit reflects it; so is its serenity, its transparency and its tranquility."
(H.D. Thoreau. DiaryAugust 1851)

A window facing north, in search of a constant light, cold, without abrupt changes, stable and serene. This is the place Gonzalo Chillida chooses to paint, in silence, daily, sometimes accompanied by music. His studio, a ganbara(attic space) facing the bay of San Sebastian, his hometown.

A painting that begins as a hymn to nature and in its development it rises as a meditation that delves into the mentality of the Norththrough a very personal vision in the representation of his landscape. It is the atmosphere of the Cantabrian Sea, its luminous quality and the tectonic force of nature that inspires and shapes Chillida's work.

A space of stillness, isolation and absence. A Northern Idea that has captivated him all his life, a metaphor for the psychic depth of the northern land. The Canadian composer Glenn Gould, describes it as a "escape from the limitations of civilization"as something "another"separate, outside of society.

In the 1960s, at the same time that Gonzalo discovers the arenas, Glenn Gould decides to stop playing in public. Both begin a definitive stage of experimentation in which spontaneity no longer interests them. The studio, like a laboratory, becomes a place for analysis, mixing and cutting of "takes" or "takes"They develop control techniques that not only serve to eliminate small imperfections, but also to favor that specific interpretation they had, prior to the conception of the work. They develop control techniques that not only serve to eliminate small imperfections, but also to favor that specific interpretation they had, prior to the conception of the work. We are faced with an interpretation through montage. Without wanting to achieve the illusion of perfection, they will opt for the meditated and calculated decision of the artifice in the form of a work. (...)

The border between Gipuzkoa and Navarre, in the Bidasoa valley, that mythical place where Chillida lives for a month a year, gives life to this metaphor of the Northin which the forest stages a melee with nature. It is there where the mists fold and unfold between the mountains and where the annual construction of a collective and ephemeral hut takes place, a form of organized consciousness, a constitutive moment. It is when the south wind begins, around the month of October, that a group of friends meets on the occasion of the pigeon flight to Africa. Mugakosoro becomes a point of origin, just as the San Sebastian dock is another place of opening to an "infinite": the sea and the horizon.

The walls of his house are white, bare, the furniture sparse. The author prefers to look only at the picture painted that day, hanging over the fireplace, away from the easel, at a different distance and scale. He then takes it back to the studio and subjects it to the gaze of a mirror, where he confirms and evaluates the final image. It is in the studio where the metaphor of the North functions for Gonzalo, not so much as a geographical space, but as a mental place, synthesizing a mode of vision susceptible of illuminating his relationship with nature as a scenographic apparatus. A mental space rescued from the natural environment that is captured by photography or film, elaborated in drawing or engraving, and finally overturned in painting.

Already in the fifties, in Castilla, he opens a new procedure that will help him to reproduce the landscape without the need to draw. It is at this time that he takes photography as a springboard and begins to paint like a photographer and photograph like a painter.

Each tide brings new drawings on the sand, new landscapes that the artist methodically records with his camera. Each sunset brings new images, from the sea or from Mount Igeldo. In his beginnings he uses a Leica camera that he inherits from his father, and develops it himself in his studio, in matte, black and white. If at the beginning, photography was used as a capturing tool, subordinated to painting, super 8, video and especially photographic panoramas, developed from the early sixties, acquire a fundamental role, since they illustrate and reveal the progression and the internal method of painting.

Through his own photographic instruments he compares the natural scenery and evaluates it from its scale, appropriating it in order to dominate it. The photographic act will function to educate the painter's eye. An aid of lenses to painting, reminiscent of the use of optical instruments by other painters who shared the same interests. An approach that requires the need to rethink the history of artistic practices outside the traditional prejudices that revolve around their alleged technological specificity. Beyond the expressive materiality, they share the same fundamental field of problems.

The small-format works appear in his studio arranged on a plane on the floor; he likes to look at them in a swoop, from top to bottom. This is how they remain active, always unfolded, on view, as models or open notes to be reworked on occasion, like photography, and serve as the basis for new images.

It is not by chance that, when we face the atmosphere of his painting, it reminds us of something of his composition, of his way of "being an image", of the first challenges of landscape photography. Gonzalo, while moving away from the photography of the avant-garde, where photography and painting cease to compete, approaches a photographic point of view that imitates the painter's gaze. A landscape technique that seeks a still life to avoid the effects of movement that pervert the image, due to the long exposure times required by his delicate emulsion. (…)

By choosing to push the system to its limit, there is an intention of mixing, of copying, of contamination between artistic fields. His photographs and films are condensed shots that reveal the evidence of his speculations about a place where time no longer exists. The capacity of photography to be analytical with respect to painting, through framing, superimpositions and guillotine, is evident. In his work there is a reorganization of space as a narrative element -based on an emotional sensitivity to light and water and to certain atmospheric qualities such as fog, snow or clouds- in an effect, as Santos Zunzunegui describes it, of tension in the expansion of duration. Giving rise to a state that is built on "continuity"a way to find the abstract in the concrete. (…)

Gonzalo manages to draw an atlas tailored to his territorial vision, in which geography is the very space of his thought. A space in which the Basque concept of nature reveals how closely linked it is to that vernacular conscience, the fact of discovering nature through experience and enjoying it as a condition for accessing it. The nuanced quality of his work also invites an attentive listening. The sound marks present in the background of his images are capable of outlining the hidden character of those who inhabit them. The forest, the sea or the river, each of them produces a sound of its own. Although in Gonzalo's work nature seems to move between vertigo, stillness and silence.

Gonzalo Chillida's work is nourished daily by a laborious process of observation, his regular departures from the studio took him for years to the same places. The sea, the river and the forest become his living spaces par excellence. They are opening points, observatories from which to capture the optimal framing. The repeated choice of some specific angles of vision, meticulously chosen, refer to that gaze immersed in an accumulation of experience, which is organized in constant framing and reframing. This obsessive repetition of his transit allows him to accumulate images that end up being recorded by his cameras and his painting. San Sebastian, his city, and some coastal towns such as Getaria, Pasajes, Hondarribia or Zumaia, among others, are also subjected to a process of deconstruction with respect to the usual mode of representation.

The interpretation of his point of view, in which framing and precise light are fundamental, form a sort of ethnographic guide to a parallel world waiting to materialize. In the transition from the photograph to the unique work, The Northern Idea exposes Gonzalo Chillida's point of view outside the limits of his recognized work.

P.S. The Northern Idea is also the title of the film that starts from a Basque ethnographic landscape that portrays Gonzalo Chillida through the criteria and motivations of his vision of nature. A reflective voice converts the author's archive into the essence and visual vocabulary outside the limits of his recognized work. The documentary makes use of interviews with people closely linked to his work and recovers the places where the artist lives and works. The metaphor of the North delves into a creative process in which painting, photography and film enter into dialogue.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. Kutxa Fundazioa, Donostia-San Sebastián, 2016).