After an early phase in Madrid and Paris in which his work could be classified as , his return to San Sebastian in the 1960s favoured a change in his visual language. The rediscovery of the Basque landscape inaugurated a new way of depicting his surrounding environs. The contours become less defined, becoming more an evocation of the light and transparency of the Cantabrian Sea, which went on to be the core element of his painting. Among the phenomena that caught his attention during the days spent observing the La Concha beach from his studio, was the effect of the light reflected in the water of the little streams and puddles left on the shore, as seen in this small oil-on-canvas painting.

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. 

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.