Gonzalo Chillida Juantegui

(San Sebastian, 1926 – 2008)

Gran paraíso de acumulada libertad interna (Great Paradise of Accumulated Inner Freedom)

1969

lithograph on paper (158/189)

45.2 x 33.1 cm

Inv. no. 35444

BBVA Collection Spain



Gonzalo Chillida made a name for himself in twentieth-century visual arts in Spain for his highly personal vision and reinterpretation of the Basque Country landscape, approaching it with a calm, introspective gaze. 

Chillida made his first incursions in the art scene in the early 1950s with a geometry-based language influenced by Daniel Vázquez Díaz (1882-1969) and Pablo Palazuelo (1915-2007). After completing his training in Madrid and following a short sojourn in Paris, he settled definitively in his hometown of San Sebastian in 1953. There he rediscovered the local natural environment which he went on to immortalize in a vast body of figurative work in which we can trace a meticulous process of formal reduction that brought it closer to abstract art. In his compositions he eliminated all human presence, focusing entirely on nature, which, once divested of all contextualization and permeated with a saturated atmosphere that lends it an enigmatic character, is turned into a universal and metaphysical setting.

In this refined lithograph, Chillida rendered what would become one of his main subject matters from the 1960s onwards: an abstract reading of the reflections of light on the little puddles and pools of water left by the ebb tide on the La Concha beach, which the artist saw every day from his studio window. Chillida hones in on a specific detail of this vast landscape, endowing it with a new aesthetic meaning charged with strong lyricism and sensibility. To achieve this effect, he first photographed certain frames of reality and then later subjected those photos to a meticulous process of formal and chromatic reduction that led to in a number of highly suggestive works where sea, sky and earth merge together and turn a material element into a visual poem of sorts.

Gran paraíso de acumulada libertad interna (Great Paradise of Accumulated Inner Freedom) belongs to El Nuevo Mar (The New Sea), a portfolio published in 1969 to illustrate a book of poems, published within Tiempo para la Alegría, a pioneering contemporary collection that weds art and literature. Comprising forty-eight titles launched between 1963 and 1983, the collection was conceived and edited by Rafael Díaz-Casariego to showcase the graphic work of artists of the time. Each book contains a selection of writings by major figures of Spanish literature (with the inclusion of just two foreign writers: Edgar Allan Poe and Rainer M. Rilke), accompanied by prints and engravings made by relevant artists. The publication illustrated by Gonzalo Chillida contains eleven colour lithographs that engage in dialogue with the poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez, one of Spain’s most illustrious poets. During the process of creation, and as he was experimenting on the stone surface, Chillida modified the view of the sea. This painstaking experimentation led to a landscape that gradually loses all visual references and organically evolves from the signature geometric compartmentalization of elements of his early period to a complete dissolution of forms.