Active for over four decades now, Mari Puri Herrero is one of the most outstanding Basque contemporary artists. Throughout her career she has been particularly attracted to the dynamic always changing element of nature, and this would underpin her approach to landscape painting. In her case this concept, heavily indebted to Impressionist ideas, takes on greater expressiveness, something which could well be attributed to her experience with engraving, an activity that left a deep imprint on her painting.

Caput mortuum. The Estuary at Abra Bay is a clear example of the ephemerality of landscape features, depicted here with imprecise brushwork rooted in plein air painting, focused above all on rendering on the canvas the instantaneity of light and the fleetingness of atmospheric events. Interpreted from an abstract approach, Herrero’s technical mastery is readily visible in the accomplishment of her firmly and determinedly executed drawing as well as in the balanced combinations of colour, applied in a light-handed gestural manner. In her practice, engraving and painting go hand in hand, a constant which could well respond to her interest in Oriental art, where both disciplines are inextricably entwined.

By using these resources, the artist manages to create a framework of hues that expresses all the turbulence of nature, with a somewhat dreamlike air grounded in Herrero’s personal creative process, in which introspection plays an instrumental role. More than the subject matter per se, Herrero is concerned with capturing an atmosphere and its lyrical background. By creating landscapes such as this, she aspires to convey her personal artistic vision and depict an inner world charged with expressiveness but also with fantasy and poetry: “a way of seeing, making, of being in the world, of living.”

The title of this painting speaks to one of the key elements in Herrero’s practice throughout the 1980s: the reference to caput mortuum. This colour, used in ancient times for priming, is a reddish ochre pigment obtained with iron oxide that acquires a violet tone under heat. Always interested in the history of colours and their power to convey ideas or meanings, in this particular one Herrero found the perfect tone to represent the industrial character of the Bilbao estuary and the particular atmosphere of its blast furnaces. An enclave currently being dismantled, the artist renders it with a certain nostalgia, paying tribute to a place of great symbolism and giving vent to a feeling shared by many artists of her generation: a concern for the loss of signs of identity of their hometown.