Epilogue at the beginning of a long journey. Miguel Zugaza

This publication celebrates the career of the painter Gonzalo Chillida in the singular process of the beginning of a long and long-awaited journey. A select retrospective of his work will travel the world, stopping in Paris, Rome and Tokyo: the city of the avant-garde, the city of classicism and, finally, the city that brings together the perfect synthesis of both, where tradition and modernity come together. The artist returns to the first two after many years; to the last one he traveled constantly through his work. In these three cities we will see the different souls of his painting illuminated by the gaze of a new public, of a new sensibility. A journey of initiation to the East, no longer for the painter, but for his painting.

His self-absorbed landscapes are transferred to the encounter with such disparate traditions accompanied by some of the most beautiful texts arising from the admiration for his painting among contemporary poets, artists and critics. Texts of discovery and dazzling by Gabriel Celaya, José Ángel Irigaray, Francisco Calvo Serraller and Antonio Saura.

These brief lines now serve as an epilogue at the beginning of a journey that begins and concludes in Bilbao, in its Museum of Fine Arts, where his children decided to keep most of the works and where the exhibition will become, upon his return, a new retrospective purpose of the artist.

First of all, it should be emphasized that this authentic journey is quite a feat for someone like Chillida, who remained apparently immobile, without distractions, installed in the singular and universal point of view of his painting, telling the incessant coming and going of the days and their tides, as Friedrich, Hokusai or Cézanne, among others, had done before him. Someone who knew how to keep with extreme discretion, sometimes almost in secret, the future of his work and who, nevertheless, had, it must also be pointed out, a decisive influence on the development of a new generation of truly extraordinary painters from San Sebastian in the seventies, such as Marta Cárdenas or Vicente Ameztoy, among others.

With them Gonzalo Chillida belongs in his own right to a genealogy of the art of painting that singularly attends to the phenomenology of things, working before us that kind of miracle of reaching the true semblance of nature through its silent and recurrent observation.

In any case, Chillida's career, like that of most of the artists of his generation, began with the interruption of another journey, that of the Spanish avant-garde itself, whose prosperous future was cut short by the Civil War and exile. Chillida, in his Madrid training in the late forties, picks up the remains of the shipwreck through the post-cubist teachings of Vázquez Díaz, in the still lifes and landscapes of Godofredo Ortega Muñoz and Benjamín Palencia, and, how not to remember it also, missing the surreal world of Alberto and his fellow countryman Nicolás de Lekuona.

Along with the teachings of the late Spanish avant-garde, the horizon of Paris soon appeared on his path, where he went on two occasions in the early 1950s. Alfonso de la Torre has recently uncovered some information about Gonzalo Chillida's contact in the French capital with the most influential artist of Spanish art in the second half of the century, Pablo Palazuelo; an oracle through which other Basque artists, such as his brother Eduardo, Oteiza, Ibarrola or Basterrechea, had already passed shortly before. With all of them Gonzalo shares a deep-rooted sense of contemporaneity, characterized by a taciturn sensibility and a very particular formal rigor. But also very early on, in the Etxe-Ondo gambara in Villabona, where he took refuge after his Parisian experience, he moved away from the collective eagerness of that generation in search of his own path.

It has often been said that his path is halfway between figuration and abstraction. I definitely believe that for Gonzalo Chillida they are the same thing. His painting deals with the changing visible, like the floating world of the Ukiyo-e, and his interest is none other than to represent it at the moment in which it reveals itself to our astonished gaze. I sense that this is what Calvo Serraller was referring to when he spoke of "painting at the limit". His photographs, films and, of course, his drawings and paintings are nothing more than the exploration of the threshold of visible experience, in the limits imposed by light and the horizon, which is still the place of the eternal combat between form and substance, or, why not also, the metaphysics referred to by Gabriel Celaya.

Modern painters undisguisedly seek a singular point of view to scan the horizon, from which to wage their particular battle against the drama of reality. Our painter placed the point of the compass in the center of the arc formed by the Bay of La Concha and from there begins the most intense story of his painting, the endless wandering along the shore of the visible, where, with each tide, space and its forms dissolve in time.

Caspar David Friedrich taught us how contemporary man definitively separates himself from nature, observes it, and at the same time, and without remedy, it looks back at us in that sublime way. At the limit of the encounter of these two gazes is Gonzalo's painting: a real place, not imagined, or not only imagined. Like a flash or a revelation of a certain truth that things jealously hide in their changing appearance. In any case, an unprecedented experience for all of us, observers of the observed.

Art and, even more so, its history is the history of the journey of forms in time and space. Perhaps one of the most fascinating journeys undertaken by man from the moment he discovers the ability to imagine the world, to represent it. Today Gonzalo Chillida's painting embarks on its particular journey through the world, and with it also our gaze, once again in search of the unknown.

We can only congratulate ourselves for the confluence of the initiative and joint work carried out by Acción Cultural Española, Etxepare, Instituto Cervantes, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and the artist's family. Thanks to all of them for their collaboration and, very specially, to Alicia Chillida, who has led as curator this beautiful exhibition and edition project.

(Excerpt from the catalog, ed. Instituto Cervantes / AC/E / Bilbao Fine Arts Museum / Etxepare Euskal Institutua Basque Institute, 2021).