A practitioner of a contemporary version of the traditional Luminist school from Valencia, Hernández Mompó’s first steps as an artist were defined by his creation of urban scenes and figurative landscapes essentialised and diluted on series on paper. The outcome is a personal, immediate and, to some extent, naive world.

After studying at the School of Fine Arts of Valencia, the artist travelled to Rome, Amsterdam and Paris, where he entered into contact with the abstract avant-garde movements of the post-war period. Upon his return to Spain in 1957 he settled in Madrid, where he worked on the periphery of the non-objective movements, on the boundaries of figuration, creating an abstraction in which it is possible to glimpse images. Following sojourns in Ibiza and Mallorca in the 1960s, he introduced greater spontaneity and luminosity into his works, leading to the whitening of the dirtier and greyer backgrounds of his previous period.

Until the end of his life he maintained his vocabulary of signs and profiles of sketchily outlined figures which seem to float magically in space. He created subtle atmospheres and dream-like effects reminiscent of much of the lyrical non-objectivity characterising the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866—1944) or Paul Klee (1879—1940).

Mercado de la plaza Cuadrada (1985) affords an insight into the connection between Mompó and Joan Miró (1893—1983) and with the graphic world of children, but with no trace here of black, marks or contours, while the profiles of the figures are always open and somehow overflowing their limits. The characters inhabiting this work remind us of toy wooden building blocks. They consist of symbols without any volume and rendered in flat colours, accompanied by stripes and dots that help to define the space.