PSJM, 2025, “Curriculum vitae of Martín Chirino. Individual and collective exhibitions from 1944 to 2024”, Painting for metal on built-up wall, 23 x 3 m

This monumental piece is a plastic tribute to the professional life of Martín Chirino in the year of his centenary. The PSJM team (Cynthia Viera and Pablo San José) have employed a plastic and conceptual procedure of their own making that they have called “social geometry”: based on statistical data or recollections, the artistic team generates minimalist compositions that are materialised in paintings, drawings, sculptures or large mural paintings.

The homage to Martín Chirino lies somewhere between a mural painting and an installation, halfway between monumental sculpture and architectural intervention. It is a portrait of time, a geometric and organic portrait of eighty years of public exhibitions. From 1944, the year when he first took part in an exhibition, to 2024, Martín Chirino’s work has been shown in 86 individual exhibitions and a total of 541 group exhibitions in Canary Islands, Spanish and international venues.

The curves of the mural respond to the oscillation of the data, to the dance of the biographical numbers, to a historical, vital account. Art is created from the numbers, bringing out the musicality of mathematics. The work thus runs on the wall like a visual melody, following a harmonic rhythm that structures a sequence of notes, data, visual winds that with a prolonged whistle appeal to the goals of art: emotion and thought.

We have not ended this curriculum in 2019, the year of the master’s death, but rather in 2024, the date when this tribute was created. The contributions of human beings to the world in which they live always seek, in some way, to achieve immortality through what they do. This becomes especially evident with the achievements of great art. As the young Alvar Aalto would say, “Form is nothing more than the desire for eternal life on earth”.

Time as space, space as time. Space and time, a priori conditions of all experience for Kant, always committed to absolute simultaneity in Euclidean space. Time, impossible to separate from the three spatial dimensions, as discovered by Einstein, who finally presented us with space-time, that temporal space in which all physical events in the universe take place. In the famous maxim that underlies this institution, “From the origin to the universe”, Martín Chirino himself makes the two concepts inseparable: time (origin) and space (universe). Here, on the wall, in its vital melody, in the visual rhythms of comings and goings, of successes and silences, the event takes place, to become eternal, to become beautiful.

LOCATION:
Martín Chirino Art and Thought Foundation
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

DATE:
2025