Manuel Hernández Mompó is a key artist in twentieth-century Spanish abstraction. The son of a painter, and superbly gifted for drawing, he developed his passion for art at a very early age and enrolled at the School of Arts and Crafts of Valencia at the age of thirteen. Two years later he enrolled at the city’s School of Fine Art. There he followed a mostly academicist training that still favoured a naturalistic view of painting.

After finishing his studies, the artist moved to Paris for a short while and then travelled to Rome and Rotterdam, where he entered into contact with the abstract avant-garde movements of the post-war period. These trips to Europe when he discovered contemporary art led him to reformulate the artistic principles he had learnt until then, and to relinquish the naturalistic language of his earlier landscapes and portraits.

During the early years of his visual innovation, the artist’s practice was noticeably influenced by the work of Paul Klee (1879-1940) until the 1960s, when it acquired the signature personal character that defined all his later works: pre-eminently abstract with a strong narrative element and a bright, cheerful appearance although without renouncing references to reality. From that moment onwards, his compositions began to acknowledge a markedly playful and optimistic character, sometimes even slightly naïve, in an attempt not so much to render a specific scene, but to visually evoke a memory.

After his period in Europe, he returned to Madrid. In the late 1960s he spent long sojourns in Ibiza and Mallorca. Those stays were crucial for his work, for the clear light of the Balearic Islands led him to create a body of work whose white backgrounds appear remarkably more spotless, flooding his paintings with intense luminosity.

Since the beginning of his career, Mompó felt a deep fascination for his surrounding environment. Scenes of everyday life, simplified to the maximum, were the focus of most of his compositions. His hometown, Valencia, acquired special relevance for the artist, who represented it in a large number of works throughout his career, initially with a strong naturalist tone, and later using a much more synthetic and abstract language. Mompó portrays the joyful and lively atmosphere of his city, evoking the to-and-froing of its inhabitants and reflecting the Sorolla-like luminosity of its coast.

This engraving, Mercado con toldos, from 1985, belonging to the BBVA Collection, depicts the brightness and movement of a day at the market. In it, Mompó simplified the profiles to the extreme, virtually suppressing any figurative reference. That said, the lines making up most of the scene and the vibrant areas of colour that seem to expand beyond its limits—the former made with technique, the latter with and —evoke the crowded and exuberant atmosphere of a day in the market. This subject, probably a memory from childhood etched in his imaginary, was recurrent in his works, often occupying a central place. In 1985, the year in which Mompó made this print, he also executed his work Mercado de la Plaza Redonda, where he depicts the ambience of one of Valencia’s most iconic sites.

Mercado con toldos reveals Mompó’s passion for lively, optimistic art removed by the darkness of the Informalists. Since the earlier stages of his career, Mompó developed a clear and bright, colourful painting, whose playfulness increased with the passing of the years, turning his works into a true ode to life, joy and freedom.