Martin Chirino: Winds. A spiral path to the origin

In the aesthetics of Martín Chirino, the spiral shape that evokes the wind is, without any doubt, essential. “In the year 59 –Martín Chirino points out- I made the first upright spiral, after living with spiral forms throughout my childhood, discovering the wind in the corners of my land and in ancient cultures. The spiral is a mythical conception, beginning and end of life. I have forged spiral shapes that, logically, have been transformed in my workshop and little by little, have been enriching their initiation meaning. At first they were vestiges, elements of nature that I discovered in ancient cultures. Mythical conception of the beginning and end of life for the first men and women of my ancestors. The spiral today is, or can be, a galaxy, a trail, a feeling that has passed from the physical to the spiritual. A disturbing gesture of obscure origin, which emerges from the memory of now-forgotten civilizations to become the banner of the ancient homeland of these peoples and races”. Cirlot reconstructs the symbol of the spiral to conclude that the attempt to reconcile the wheel of transformations with the mystical center and the immobile motor arises from it, or, at least, it constitutes an invitation to this penetration into the interior of the universe, that is, for your privacy. The exhibition on the spirals of El Viento by Martín Chirino, presents twenty of his works that allow us to appreciate the importance of these forms throughout his career. It should be kept in mind that the spiral, for this creator, refers to the islands in a double sense: it is an iconographic motif of aboriginal culture, of the paintings that are kept in the Canary Islands Museum, but it is also the consistency of the wind that tenses and warps the plants, their branches, which ruffles the waves, which bursts against the rocks.