The piece, Eulogy of light XX, can be found inside the farmhouse and dates from 1990. This is a sculpture made from a block of alabaster in which some cavities have been opened up with shapes that resemble cubes.

Alabaster is a type of stone whose characteristic feature is that it is very soft; that is why sculptures made of this material are safeguarded in the farmhouse: look for some more alabaster pieces and you will be able to easily identify them: they come in various colours but they all have one feature in common: they are translucent.

Alabaster is translucent, that is, it lets light pass through it. Look around you and you will be able to see other items in the farmhouse that are not sculptures and on which alabaster has been used: can you find them? The use of thin sheets of alabaster in windows is very common in churches in the Aragon region, where this material is abundant and which is where this concrete block comes from.

It is no coincidence then that Eduardo Chillida was to use this translucent stone to make a Eulogy of Light. Take a look at the relationship that this material has with light: the sculpture is located at the spot where various points of light converge: a large glass door, a window... The light enters the sculpture through the sculpted galleries and a light and shade effect is created on the inside; it is a living sculpture that changes depending on the intensity and direction of the light.

From the 1960s onwards Eduardo Chillida worked with alabaster, after a trip to Greece. He was astonished when he contemplated the classical marble temples there that incorporated the bright white light of the Mediterranean into the structure. The Basque sculptor also wanted to work with light; in this case, with the light of the Bay of Biscay, which is darker, and which he called “black light”. For this purpose this stone was the ideal material: “Alabaster is a material on which you can get the light to appear on the edges in an extraordinary way. It is the only material that has this virtue”.

This Eulogy of Light XX is linked to architecture through the way that the sculptor works on space. The space is just as important as the material and they both complement each other. Eduardo Chillida excavates the stone to create spaces that may remind us of caves or houses. Imagine that you yourself are a tiny being wandering through the spaces inside the alabaster, with light falling on you through the different openings... Eduardo Chillida said: “stone is the world that I start out from. I work on its interior and I create a space in it that establishes a link to the universe”.