La mesa de Giacometti I

"Chillida's sculptures do not reflect geometric bodies in a temporal space, but neither do they allude to a history or a mythology; rather they evoke a sort of qualitative physics recalling that of the pre-Socratic philosophers." (Octavio Paz, cited in Eduardo Chillida exhib.cat. Venice Biennale, 1990, p.15.)

Chillida's 'mesas' (tables) form a thematic body of work in the artist's oeuvre that explore and attempt to establish a sense of equilibrium between elevated/levitated form and the all-pervasive force of gravity. They are essentially elevated platforms that explore a physical dynamism between the horizontal and the vertical. La mesa de Giacometti I (Giacometti's Table I) is both a striking and typical example of this theme in Chillida's art which through its style and its title pays hommage to the great Swiss sculptor who was both an important influence and a personal friend.

Consisting of a rectangular platform elevated on a single iron plinth, the horizontal surface echoes the "plazas" and "clearings" of Giacometti's own sculptures where an existential sense of alienation was expressed by the arrangement of a number of lone figures, immersed in and surrounded by an infinite and all-intrusive space. La mesa de Giacometti I is similar in that a powerful and timeless sense of scale and space is established on the table-top through the carefully positioning and construction of its rectangular shapes which in turn generate a very human sense of proportion and feeling. In this, as in so much of his work Chillida has been guided by an intuitive sense of the vertical rather than a strictly mathematical one. Chillida's rectangles are each carefully angled and shaped so as to generate an individual presence similar to that of Giacometti's emaciated figures. Like them, in this predominantly horizontal work Chillida has been particularly concerned with the proportional relationships that exist between these vertical rectangular forms and the shadows they cast. The angle and proportion of the shadow was for him a human characteristic that was first divined by the ancient Greeks and which he saw as encapsulating a sense of what he called the "limit" - that precise, crucial and ultimately dangerous point at which space and matter interact. "The limit is the protagonist of space, just as the present, another limit, is the real protagonist of time," Chillida has often asserted. Here, in this work, a series of differing interactions between near-vertical forms has been coordinated into a spatial play of form that simultaneously speaks - like Giacometti's work - of both the intimate and the infinite.

'It must be remembered that the Greeks, when they discovered the right angle - it was a lovely discovery - it was the angle that man made with his shadow. That is the discovery of the right angle; they called it the gnomon (indicator). This angle has 90 degrees, or really, was this a later rationalization? We don't know if the angle they had discovered had 90 , 89 or 92 degrees. it's what the man made with his shadow. In fact, it is a living angle, it can have all kinds of variants , it will walk around like a plumb line that doesn't stop. I pay more attention to these things than to the absolute definition of the 90-degree right angle. In this way, if I move the rigor or the coldness of the right angle whether towards one slightly obtuse or slightly more acute, the spatial responses are infinitely richer." ( Chillida. At the School of Engineers of Bilbao, 1998, p. 18.)