Martín Chirino: Homage to Marinetti. Speed ​​in the infinitive

This exhibition at the Fundación de Arte y Pensamiento Martín Chirino brings together an important part of the cycle known as Tribute to Marinetti by Martín Chirino Martín, a theme that he began to explore in the early nineties and persistently revisited virtually until his death.

As the author has noted, this series by Chirino ‘offers one of the manybeautiful aporias that define his work: the slow creation of speed. TheCanarian artist revisits Marinetti to speed up the pace of his iron sculp-tures’. Upon reading this essay, it becomes perfectly clear how Chirino,having trapped the wind with his Spirals, ultimately became interestedsolely and exclusively in the approach to speed proposed by the founderof futurism. Once again, referring to this series, Cruz remarks that ‘thepieces composing it act as an interpretation of the imagery used by Ma-rinetti, not by the movement itself’

Chirino never ceased to bear in mind the historical avant-garde, and it was foreseeable that he should turn to Futurism, thus paying tribute to Marinetti, interested as he was in the spiral, the wind, the flight of birds, swirls of water and the twisting of the Sabines, in a beautiful series, revisiting the defence of speed by means of a spiral that opens up in a delicate line, accepting the openness of the sculptural figure to its surroundings proposed by Boccioni.

¨…I was inspired by the Futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to favour that idea that speed only exists when it is executed. If one runs a lot, one is swift. And this is the most appropriate and analogous depiction of a changing world: a feeling of perpetual movement…”

El Homenaje a Marinetti (The Tribute to Marinetti), the founder of Futurism, also emerges from a subject that the master was passionate about and that he never ceased to perfect, expanding the challenge that aspires to transform space, giving the forging of iron the speed and the rampancy of an immense flourish. A spiral opens up with a fascinating elegance, a delicate stroke, almost like a hand-drawn flourish. However, it is not merely the thrill of the gesture of hammering that is rendered visible, but the “tactile” pleasure of the folds, the intensity of a material exposed to a search for harmony.