By Manuel Morales
After a life shaping the iron, the artist Martin Chirino Lopez (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1925) received "a great honor yesterday, which in this work are scarce and are delayed, "he said shortly before becoming a member of honor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.
Chirino outlined in his speech, La fábula del herrero (The Blacksmith fable), " a little fabled autobiography ". Member of the group El Paso, to which he joined in 1958, he noted in his words that "perseverance" has been always his "credo and labor standard" because it is what " the artist makes: to create a solid work".
Proposed for the Academy of Fine Arts by sculptors Venancio Blanco and Juan Bordes –his countryman that read the answer speech -- and Professor of Contemporary Art History Francisco Calvo Serraller, the author recalled his childhood: "I used to lie down on the golden sand of the beach, looking at the horizon waiting for this to move.”That "child, somewhat surreal" became interested in sculpture looking "iron hulls of ships stranded in the shipyards" where his father worked. “I do not know if it was fina, but iron dazzled me".
Chirino also spoke of the relationship with his land, "between love and rejection" of a horse islands "between Europe and Latin America" and so close to Africa. This globetrotting --Inglaterra, Paris, New York-- said, however, that has never forgotten his origin. "And now I'm claim it," he said before the event. Artist of abstract work, had a special mention for Julio Gonzalez and constructivists by the influence projected on him. Of these he remembered his slogan "Less is more", which means that "simple ideas could go further." "Many of contemporary Spanish artists starting in Goya and talking about our identities, we then looked for solutions, we wanted modernity." These were the years of the Franco regime, "of great intellectual drought," in which the exhibition at a gallery in Madrid was frowned upon by the regime, which closed it early. It was a time when he acquired at El Rastro the material for his work.
That's how this “art blacksmith "was forged, whose sculpture is "twinned with the plow and the grating, popular instruments that are man prolongation and link him to the ground in harmony". Finally, Chirino told about a constant presence in his work: the spiral. Again, the earth: "From the first traces of Canarian settlers found basalt inscribed circular shapes." His spirals are allegorical representations of the island and wind, like the rest of his production, "is covered by a hunger for beauty."
Source: El País
