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

 Informalism 

Term coined by the French art critic Michel Tapié (under the name of art informel) to define the art movement that covers a whole range of abstract and gestural trends that emerged in Europe in the 1940s in parallel with the development of

 Abstract Expressionism 

This contemporary painting movement emerged within the field of abstraction in the 1940s in the United States, from where it spread worldwide. Rooted in similar premises and postulates as Surrealism, the Abstract Expressionist artists regarded the act of painting as a spontaneous and unconscious activity, a dynamic bodily action divested of any kind of prior planning. The works belonging to this movement are defined by the use of pure, vibrant primary colours that convey a profound sense of freedom. The movement’s main pioneers were, among others, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). Leading Spanish exponents of the movement are Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) and José Guerrero (1914-1991), who lived for some time in New York City, where they were in first-hand contact with the many artistic innovations taking place there around that time.

in America. The movement is defined by a non-figurative language that lends a very significant role to the use of materials. The defining moment for Informalismo in Spain was in the 1950s, with a generation of artists whose languages embraced both European Art Informel and American

 Abstract Expressionism 

This contemporary painting movement emerged within the field of abstraction in the 1940s in the United States, from where it spread worldwide. Rooted in similar premises and postulates as Surrealism, the Abstract Expressionist artists regarded the act of painting as a spontaneous and unconscious activity, a dynamic bodily action divested of any kind of prior planning. The works belonging to this movement are defined by the use of pure, vibrant primary colours that convey a profound sense of freedom. The movement’s main pioneers were, among others, Arshile Gorky (1904-1948) and Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). Leading Spanish exponents of the movement are Esteban Vicente (1903-2001) and José Guerrero (1914-1991), who lived for some time in New York City, where they were in first-hand contact with the many artistic innovations taking place there around that time.

. These included, among others, Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012), Josep Guinovart (1927-2007), August Puig (1929-1999), Antonio Saura (1930-1998), Manolo Millares (1926-1972) and Rafael Canogar (1935).

, 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 the case of the painting of the tree and the cloud, the landscape has been achieved through a gestural extraction of matter: it is the very absence of paint that allows us to see the image.

Each of these fragments, a leaf, a cloud, a house, a horizon line, makes reference to the whole, to the evoked landscape.