Chirino in America: the sculptor who seeks and seeks

Aviles, Asturias,

The importance of the United States was known in the future of Martín Chirino’s trajectory (as an artist and as a cultural manager, at the head of the Circle of Arts and the Caam de las Palmas), but since his stays there occurred with intermittences, a deep knowledge of the weight of that American imprint had not been acquired. The finding of new documentation has allowed excavating in these relationships and the fruits of these investigations can now be seen in “Dear Martin.

This project is part of the programming organized by the Martín Chirino Art and Thought Foundation to commemorate the centenary of its birth, a program that integrates a dozen exhibitions in which the journey of a creator is reviewed to whom we usually identify by its spirals but that, beyond them, was heir to the Spanish sculptoric vanguard of the first half of the twentieth century in the second, in the second Gargallo and deploying in his pieces a deep interest in Guanche culture. It became one of the fundamental figures of the renewal of plastic languages during the postwar period, with their participation in the El Paso group, of which he would be a founding member in 1957; That group would mean the emergence of an art rooted in the Spanish tradition, and in turn criticized with the political and social situation, and supposed the internationalization of the authors linked and their work.

Dear Martin. (Martín Chirino in the United States). Niemeyer Center, Aviles. Photography: Carranza

We can say that Chirino’s work is based on two principles: wrought iron, majority material of his sculptures; and the aforementioned spiral, which was a constant symbol and solution throughout his career and that synthesizes the foundations of his creation, that is, the notion of folding and deployed and the horizontal and vertical development in the space and in the curvature of an element that, in his hands, and recovering the tradition of the forge, becomes ductile.

The set of its production extends and groups chronologically, in successive chapters, according to concrete reasons whose referent is always in nature and the real world and which insists again and again, until trying to exhaust its expressive possibilities.

Since the sixties, Chirino would make numerous trips to the United States, attending to an impulse due to the connatural displacement to his personality since an early time and at a time when it was not frequent. It was possibly, as explained by the tower in the presentation of this exhibition, the most collected post -war artist, exposed and broadcast in that country: he presented nine individual samples at the Grace Bortenicht Gallery, with which he had a relationship for more than three decades, from a contract manually signed at the Palace Hotel in Madrid in the sixties until the closing of that room in the nineties; His work is represented in a good number of museums (the Dallas Meadows Museum planned around 1989 to collect his creations on American soil, in a proposal that would be titled “Balance and Harmony” and that did not materialize); And he was praised by some of the most important critics in the country, such as Dore Ashton, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Hilton Kramer …, in addition to acquiring popularity among architects of popular culture, such as the singer and musician of Cabaret Bobby Short, who treasured his compositions. Likewise, Chirino was part of, already in 1960, of the MoMa collective “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture”, which the aforementioned O’Hara.

It is interesting to carefully read the posters of this Asturian exhibition, which offer abundant information of that intrahistory of the gathered pieces: almost thirty sculptures and many other drawings that are completed with film works, correspondence, photographs, publications and also music that contributes to this project a certain immersive air. Linked to their American stays, they come from various institutional and particular collections, including Chirino’s own legacy, the Azcona collection, the BBVA collection, the Funds of the Valencian Ivam or the Reina Sofía Museum.

In the background they all talk about to what extent for Chirino the trip was practically a vital mandate since he accompanied his father in childhood in his African peripos: he knew very soon Paris and London, he learned the practice of the forge in Cuenca and admired greatly the decision of Brancusi to travel Europe practically from end to end to Paris until it reached Paris, Meca artistic at the beginning of the 20th century. Represented for him the idea of Wayfarer, the endless walker who assumes that, as he reaches the sites, he leaves, that is, a man who seeks and seeks, without allowing himself to feel any nostalgia for what he leaves behind (…). I was always a reconcentrated person and prone to the soliloquy; And I felt what is called “the inner call.” The movement was a way to get away from the helplessness often experienced by artists.