Txerto

Txerto (1972) belongs to the same year as Egitura and shares its concerns, though at a markedly different scale. A compact black form occupies the upper portion of a large, otherwise untouched sheet, its interior interrupted by a hooked white line that folds twice and returns on itself.

The title is Basque for “graft” — the horticultural operation of joining one living element to another so that they grow as one. It is a characteristically Chillidan choice: a word naming a process of union rather than an object.

Scale and Emptiness

The most striking decision here is the relation between image and paper. The etched plate occupies less than a quarter of the sheet, leaving a broad margin of untouched wove paper on all sides.

That emptiness is not framing. In Chillida’s terms it is the space the form acts upon — the same silence that surrounds his iron works and gives them their tension. The small black mass gains weight precisely from what is left around it.

The Line as Graft

The white line within the black field does not divide it into halves. It enters, turns, and hooks back, binding two portions of the mass together in the manner the title suggests. Where Egitura proposes structure, Txerto proposes junction.

Chillida returned to these operations throughout his graphic work of the 1970s, treating the printed plate as a compressed equivalent of the sculptural problem: how two masses meet, and what happens in the space between them.

Provenance & Documentation

Signed and numbered in pencil.

Provenance: Private Collection Reference: CHL-GRO-02