Gonzalo Chillida is regarded as one of the innovators of Basque landscape painting and a key figure of in Spain.

From a very early age he felt a passion for art. In 1947 Chillida enrolled at the San Fernando School of Fine Arts in Madrid, a training he later furthered at the Colegio de España in Paris. He was profoundly attracted to nature and landscape, subject matters that would play a major role in his compositions.

His earliest works from the 1950s—still lifes and urban and natural landscapes—moved within the coordinates of naturalism, although they gradually evolved towards abstraction. At the beginning, the artist experimented with painting with works in what one might call a Post-Cubist aesthetic, little by little softening and nuancing colour and with the human presence becoming more and more absent. They are silent images, expressed with a language akin to that of the artists from the , but with metaphysical undertones reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) and of the mysterious scenes painted by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978).

With the passing of time, Chillida’s palette grew totally neutral and the shapes of his earlier compositions were diluted. After returning to San Sebastian, his rediscovery of the landscapes by the Cantabrian Sea revealed for him endless possibilities that would lead Chillida to develop a totally intimate and personal vernacular. From that moment, his gaze was captivated by views of his hometown, which he depicted time and again in an abstract language. Among the manifold elements making up that landscape, Chillida focused particularly on five essential elements: sea, sky, water, sand and the horizon which he saw from the large vantage point of his home, close to the bay of the La Concha beach. After a well-pondered contemplation of the scene, Gonzalo Chillida merged and simplified the above-mentioned elements, creating a body of paintings whose outcome is a true visual poem that transcends the limits of the purely physical.

This work in the BBVA Collection, an interesting instance of Gonzalo Chillida’s visual landscape, belongs to the series Arenas [Sands], that represented his most distinctive and personal subject matter. Chillida began to work on that series in the 1960s, driven by his fascination for the effects of light on the little pools of water the ebb tide leaves behind on the sand. Back in the late-fifties, he was already visually exploring this phenomenon, although he still depicted it with a realist aesthetic. It was in the following years when the artist shifted to abstraction and completely shed all naturalist references.

In the late-seventies and early-eighties, his Arenas evolved towards a more geometric and slightly more compact landscape, in which the sand acquires a tectonic appearance. That shift becomes evident in the work in hand, with the sand acquiring a new physiognomy. That notwithstanding, this work continues to display Chillida’s dreamlike atmospheres: that place/non-place in which the horizon becomes blurred at the point where sea and sky meet; that uninhabited landscape whose boundaries stretch far beyond the purely visible and whose suggestive and soothing shapes lead us to introspection and thought.

In contrast with more aggressive views of the Basque landscape offered by other artists, Gonzalo Chillida proposes a fully poetic and reflective gaze, whose forms evince his admiration for Eastern philosophy. All the elements in his works flow harmoniously, materialising themselves in abstract landscapes that transcend the limits of the real to enter into the world of metaphysical ideas.