by Gracie Adelina May

Soñar el espacio
Exhibition by Eduardo Chillida
Madrid, 2026

I am trying to de-prioritise the written word. I am trying to place less importance on the words that accompany art because surely the art at hand is capable of formulating a conversation of its own with me, in its own terms.

The Eduardo Chillida exhibition has, first and foremost, a wall of text bigger and wider than me. I am always embarrassed, living in Madrid, to veer towards the inevitable English translation in galleries, but to read the Spanish would take me painstakingly long and the exhibition closes in an hour. The textual overview is competent, sufficiently encompassing and accurate. I am still growing exasperated with synopses, and even the essayistic, academic tendency of tying up loose ends.

In the Prado museum the text that accompanies art is sometimes much more far-reaching and poetic than what is necessarily warranted—but I cannot blame this either. I write now into this tradition of transference, of seeing art and feeling bizarrely, egoistically certain that I can and must use it to create something else. In the hope of never being selfish, to compensate for my consumption, and consumption, and consumption, I can slip into the space of the artist as left by the artist. Call this In Dialogue With…

Dialogue is like a metaphor, with vehicle, tenor, primary and secondary forces. Who gives anyone the right to the posterior? Is the afterthought worthwhile on its own? And is the accompanying text doomed to be a meta-textual contemplation on the means and ends of artistic production? I may as well have lunch.

The House of Forgetfulness. Body of Air.

 How Profound the Wind is.

 Project for Monument to Tolerance.

 In Praise of the Horizon.

 Meeting Place

At the Limit

Hard not to feel as though the naming of these sculptures must be the zenith. But is the naming always a secondary act? An artist I strongly admire says sometimes words and phrases come to her and through the artistic process she finds ways to figure out what it is the words mean. In this way, the action/reaction of art is reversed, and the written seems to have a more powerful influence over the senses than what I usually consider allowed.

I suppose this resistance to the written word stems from a university literary education, where deconstructive and decolonial theories are foregrounded as radical ways of reconceptualising received knowledge. Throw off the shackles of Descartes and foreground the body. Realise and remember the language-sign problem. Derrida will say the word is always absent; Wittgenstein towards the end of his life said that ‘the inner is a delusion’. Interiority is best represented and made known to us through writing, we associate the act of writing as this transference between immaterial and material. Copyright law and intellectual property seem unimaginable without this priming of the written word. And then, the end of language, the wall that marks the end. Body of Air is surely the very Cartesian dream of this overcoming. 

The exhibition includes over one hundred pieces of Chillida’s work, including sketches which are, we are told, to be treated as artefacts in their own right. I wish we could always play the minor keys on this level ground. We are guilty of forming relationships with everything else, finding patterns and in these patterns a temporal stretch pinpointing the rise of fame, eventual assimilations into the cultural elite, and the ultimate meaningless sign-marker: Taste. I am personally going through waves of illusionment and disillusionment in my personal life, wondering if every person is doomed to figure out the same problems, artistically or not, and find the same answerlessness found in wind tunnels or echo chambers. Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet… 

The sketches are strikes out of a dark space onto a light one. Flashes of ink on paper that seem hieroglyphic at times and chemical at others. They seem a priori and axiomatic as much as they do remote. The skeletal arrangement of lines on certain sketches remind me of chemical compounds, bonds and double bonds between discrete atoms, and the changing of the part in response to the whole. Brian Dillon in his essays on Affinity notes the kind of violence of this transformation, the things usurping other things. 

Halfway in between alphabets and numbers, one sketch in particular looks not dissimilar to the Katakana alphabet, or like small angular bodies crawling, jumping and falling to a summit we cannot see. The fact I can see bodies in all of the most insignificant of lines might not be down to artistic expression, but also to the viewer’s hopeless tendency to personify, and in this personification attribute empathy. “I should not pity the lines”, I think to no one. Other pieces lose their geometric certainty and instead seem to show accumulation and coagulation of liquids, or gas. 

There is a wall dedicated to Chillida’s drawings of hands, which embody this smoky, bulbous form more akin to his earlier sculpture. I stare at the hands for a long time, because in them I can see everything. They recur throughout his work, and once I see them everything immediately makes sense to me. He loved his own hands—if he did not, he at least kept returning to them as some kind of motif and emblem to be demonstrated through his other works. When I was first experimenting with art I would draw my hands over, and over again. They are a limitless supply of life and the ultimate symbol of creation. In literature, a lot is to be said for the image of the writing hand. It can be disembodied, standing in for the thinking mind, materialising the action of Cogito ergo sum. The hands, the palms, with their folds and many creases are the point at which both lightness and dark are expressed. Emptiness and fullness are present, for example, when we peer into the gentle form of the cupped hand holding nothing but its own shadow. To quote Descartes more fully, we might say, ‘Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.’ I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am.’ 

Artistic creation, the fingers that appear, intertwined, reaching, those grabbing things, they body forth the spirit of the maker, medium and message. 

He speaks to us (through a question printed on the wall near the end of the exhibition): ‘Thanks to space there are limits to the physical universe and I can be a sculptor. Are there also limits for the spirit?’ Philosophers like Wittgenstein look to the language wall (or ‘gate’) and acknowledge the human totality of dissonance and inexpressibility. The tools we have allow us to create, but does this mean the soul is the message, inscribed through materials, secondary and supplemented, manifesting finally as words on a tapioca coloured wall? How profound the wind is. 

I do not approach exhibitions the right way. I have started this one backwards, half accidentally but not unwittingly. I encounter the hands about a quarter way through, and am unsure if they are meant to synecdochally encompass everything I see, or suggest some gradual accumulation of artistic energy. I circle around myself, turning from sketch to sculpture and back again in an almost haphazard manner. To me this feels intuitive and correct. I pay close attention to what is titled and what isn’t. Notice the discrepancies in the stories suggested by the form and that disclosed by the names attributed. Then, on second thought, how they are not dissonant but complementary. The undoubtable openness of many of his sculptures, including ones such as ‘Looking for Light’ and ‘Project for Monument to Tolerance.’ How some seem to really truly demand an erasure of individuality and the complete surrender to something as hopeless and universal as the future: in praise of the horizon. 

I grew tired of deconstruction, the impossible arbitrariness of it all. Linguistically speaking, it is not true that all words are random associations of letters with no material grounding. But there are problems in this interplay with the material and the immaterial, with our consistent and successive downplay of the latter in praise of the former. In part as a reaction against this, in my MA I studied extensively the object world of texts, the importance of texts-as-objects, of texts as being bound by the limits of their world and by the complete vulnerability of their spatial relationships. Look at marginalia, bookbinding, re-used paper. 

I see a picture of Chillida in his studio, working, surrounded by a million pieces of scrap paper. In the accompanying video to the exhibition we see the welding studio where iron is smoldered and melted and forced into shape. Ben Lerner calls the poem the ‘cut’ because it is the splicing of dead matter, the crisp and discerning mechanical movement we make through gesture and art to change the present form. I can see now that sculpting does the same in praxis and in theory—the cut is indistinguishable from the cutting tools. 

The smoke, fire and dust emanating from the scene seems a caricature of labor and labouring conditions. It feels hot, dense and heavy in a way that I always know sculpture can be. Recently Apple has been releasing commercials in two forms: the advert and the maker’s process, which accounts for a second advert. The indispensable part of art is the artist’s process, the making hand, and the pieces of debris that remain. Is the hand enough, scrunched, offering, prodding, ink-stained, limited—taking, giving?

---