Mari Puri Herrero cherishes and reimagines the urban landscape of Bilbao, the city she grew up in, the industrial activity of its estuary, and the surrounding mountains and nature one can always see at the end of its streets. Her painting seems to capture changing skyscapes and times of year that impregnate both countryside and people, whose silhouettes blend into the background. Her brushwork produces a suggestive language centred on the everyday yet at once allowing us to catch glimpses of dream-like mirages, whose interpretation is always left to the beholder.

Around 1985 to 1986 the artist began to experiment with representations of day and night. In the works from this period Herrero relegated the symbolic charge of human figures in order to create an atmospheric painting in which silhouettes are merely suggested in a foggy setting. However, between the daytime and nocturnal scenes she found many lights and shadows in common, vestiges lingering from other times of the days that the artist explains as follows: “I felt that the night still had something of daylight, while during the day I could see shadows that belonged to the night”.

Night and Day are two quintessential diptychs from that period. They were first presented in an exhibition with the same title held in 1986 at the Durango History Museum. These four oil paintings were the central works in that show, rounded off with a number of watercolours exploring the same subject matter. The works were accompanied by William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43, which revolves around antithesis and absence and reveals how “darkly bright” love disturbs the mind, confusing day and night, darkness and brightness. For Herrero, the use of double paintings is no mere whim. As Miguel Zugaza underscores, this artist’s diptychs and triptychs take on a clear spiritual character. Although on other occasions she has paired canvases in order to expand the field of painting, here she mines the religious connotations of this format with the intention of associating everyday spaces with magical or sacred places. In the two diptychs, a more narratively charged image, in which human profiles and silhouettes emerge from the mist to coexist within the scene, dialogues with a more abstract and atmospheric image.

In the case of Night, the figures with silhouetted profiles seem to be engaged in conversation. Behind the silhouettes is a plate and cutlery on a table, the knife held in a hand. Speaking about the symbol of the laid table, the artist said: “Whenever we get together to have a drink, to work, to meet, to eat, to play cards… it is always around a table.” The dining room has been a recurrent motif in Herrero’s work from the 1970s to date, whether in different versions of a large space with various characters sharing experiences while waiting to be served by a chef, or in paintings centred on a plate with food.

This image is accompanied by a nocturnal scene. A detailed observation reveals a glimpse of the imposing crown of a tree in the bluish semi-darkness. Here we perceive the stillness of night in evident contrast with the bustling social activity of the adjacent painting. 

The BBVA Collection has two versions of these diptychs, the larger ones being the works presented in the exhibition at the Durango History Museum in 1986.