The perception of landscape provides both the space of creation and the axis around which Hernández Pijuan’s work revolves. After a conceptual period in the 1960s, with large-format paintings depicting single solitary objects redolent of still lifes and imbuing the space with a transcendental quality, the 1970s saw the emergence of structured spaces in which the artist examined colour, light and movement.

The 1980s involved a return to a in which his vision shifted from the oneness of large surfaces to the specificity of the object —a single object that ends up by occupying the whole surface of the work. In the 1990s, his practice became more synthetic and the elements are reduced to the pattern and the sign, now the only elements of the landscape.

His work shows an evident influence of , the Spanish non-objective movement, but also of the French and American post-war abstraction he found during his stay in Paris (1957).

In 1987 he finished his PhD dissertation on Painting a Space: a Personal Experience, which provided a theoretical backbone to his painting. This decade is when all the features characterising his mid-career production appeared: areas of colour, calligraphic drawing, and chromatic austerity. His interest in the description of space, the absolute focus of his work, allows him to play with large colour areas and textures within a restrained palette. This shift turned landscape into a recurrent thematic element in his practice: the landscapes of Folquer, near the Segarra area where his mother was born.

Those elaborated backgrounds give rise to motifs of memory, of recalling, which he interprets expressively through areas of colour or using a more calligraphic painting closer to drawing, influenced by Oriental writing, responding to his quest for simplicity combined with expression.

The motifs in the three works from the 1980s in the BBVA Collection are recurrent in this artist’s work and continued being part of his world of painting. Also worth pointing out is that two of these works are created on cardboard. Indeed, for Hernández Pijuan paper is not a medium for experimentation in his works, but a domain in which to build his creation.

In his drawing of a landscape, the horizon is sketched against a background of earth. Then we have the specificity of the object in the painting of the white leaf on a black, monochromatic, dense background, with the vegetal element claiming its space on the support and reminding us of the effect of chalk on a blackboard.