Gonzalo Chillida, water and mountain painter, arrives in Rome for the first time

Andrew Cuesta Rome, 18 Mar The Spanish artist Gonzalo Chillida won the title of “painter of water and the mountain” after portraying the essence of the Cantabrian coast in his work, which, for the first time, is exhibited in Rome in a monographic exhibition “conceived as a travel suitcase”, his daughter Alicia, curator of the exhibition, explains to Efe. The exhibition, which opens tomorrow and can be visited until July 9 in the Dalí room of the Cervantes Institute, covers the artistic and vital career of the San Sebastian painter through 34 works, ten lithographs and 180 photographs and collages, as well as a documentary. Gonzalo Chillida (1926-2008) began his pictorial career in 1947 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, portraying the landscapes of Castile, so different from those of his native San Sebastian, but which he captivated all his life and which he defined as “the closest thing to the sea because of its sandy deserts”, according to his daughter. After that first period, in which his painting was very marked by the great masters of the Prado, his style went to a geometric stage in his passage through Paris until his return in the 1960s to San Sebastián. “His career leads to his driving law, which is the sands, which makes him the painter of water and the mountain, from the Cantabrian coast, a landscape that he tried to translate into his paintings,” explains Alicia Chillida. This setting marked by fog, sea, sea light and sand will be reflected in his canvases with a palette of gray and ochre colors that symbolize “the depth of the ideas of the north”. The painter achieved this depth with an increasingly loose brushstroke with which he “tried to gain greater freedom”, highlights the curator of the exhibition, which has the collaboration of the Cervantes Institute of Rome, Spanish Cultural Action and Etxepare Euskal Institutua. But this exhibition goes beyond the 34 selected canvases and presents to the Italian public a selection of 180 photographs and collages, “vital” to him, since they were “his true experimental method”, although until now he had not paid attention in detail to this method, says his daughter. “I think it's important because he's not really interested in the transposition of reality live, but rather the experimentation of what editing is, artifice, and in that Gonzalo is a modern artist,” he says. Along these lines, the deputy director of culture of the Cervantes Institute, Ernesto Pérez, highlights Chillida's “special look”, between poetic and intimate, a mixture that few Spanish painters have achieved. “It is between figuration and abstraction with a special quality and light that seems to us to be at the height of the great contemporary painters, and that is what we want to teach the world,” he says. Before the opening, Alicia Chillida travels with Efe through the exhibition halls, which she arrives in Rome after passing through Paris, with the watchful eyes of an art expert who checks that everything is perfect, but also with a sweetness that reveals “filial love and appreciation for a work known for a long time”, she acknowledges. The curator regrets that her father's work did not transcend as did the work of her uncle, the sculptor Eduardo Chillida: “They had very different approaches to their professional life and despite having a very close relationship it was divergent. Gonzalo never liked to show himself publicly, he was an affable but very intimate person.” This same silence with which he surrounded himself, “always veiled as his paintings”, takes on a “very deep meaning in his painting”, which in its aesthetics borders on an oriental style. “In Paris he met oriental teachers but I don't think he came to this oriental style consciously, but perhaps because of the love of emptiness,” explains his daughter. After stopping in Tokyo, where the police station believes that the work of the Spanish painter will be better understood than anywhere else, Chillida's “travel suitcase” will return in 2023 to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, where it will be complemented with more material from one of the greatest protagonists of the contemporary Spanish cultural scene. CHIEF acd/mr/cg (photo) (video)