Northeast

Joaquín Vaquero Turcios, 1994. Corten steel.
It is four metres high by five metres wide and is an unmistakable sign of the link between Gijón/Xixón -the city-, the sea -the Cantabrian Sea-, and industry, the engine of development throughout the twentieth century. The Northeast is a stele, a mural. In its structure, smooth surfaces alternate with overlapping, irregular ones. There is perforated steel, perhaps to allow the wind to recreate in it, when the light collaborates, the Northeast seems silhouetted against the sky and the sea. And there is the steel rusted by the passage of time, reddish and hard, drunk on saltpeter and companion of seagulls that come to perch on its backs.