Joan Hernández Pijuan

Joan Hernández Pijuan ranks as one of the most important contemporary Catalan artists. He was born in Barcelona in 1931; he died in his native city in December 2005.

Since 1976 Pijuan had been a professor at Escuela Superior de Belles Arts de Sant Jordi, Barcelona – where he had once been a student himself. In 1989 he was appointed Chair of Painting at the Facultad de Belles Arts de la Universidad de Barcelona. In 1996 he was made a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando de Madrid.

 

Pijuan was a painter of stillness, striving to capture a sense of quiet; to give shape to an endless void. Indeed, the barren landscape of his Catalan homeland was always the starting point and inspiration for his paintings and drawings.

 

The artist worked with a variety of techniques. His images were often created using several layers of paint, his palette picking up the tones of the harsh natural world around him: the matt ochre tones of the dry earth and the sienna red of the sun-soaked rocks in the distance. In some of his works, the impasto colours have been thickly applied with a spatula, creating relief- like surfaces that almost seem to be moving. Often the top layers of paint are semi-transparent, allowing deeper layers to be seen, an effect that mirrors the way Pijuan absorbed the landscape on his long walks. Thus the vast expanse becomes a sequence of images superimposed one upon the other, each step forward creating a new image.

Using the handle of his brush, Joan Hernández Pijuan would scratch lines and structures into the still wet layers of paint, thus managing to combine painting with drawing. With this bold gesture, he confidently sidestepped all the disputes over paradigms in art history, century-long debates about which technique represents the pinnacle of artistic expression: drawing or painting.

 

In his early images, Pijuan made use of drawn elements very sparingly. One of his motifs is the frequently seen set of borders that run along the edge of an image like a frame. Pijuan thus created a kind of picture within a picture – or a window that opens upon a landscape.

In his later paintings, he was more inspired by the language of shapes that the landscape “speaks,” turning fields, villages and olive groves into abstract squares, rhombi and circles. From these forms he added airy woven patterns that stretched across the entire pictorial space.

Pijuan's works featured three times at the Venice Biennale, twice as he represented his country (1960, 1970), and in 2005 when he was honoured with a special show at the Italian pavilion. Also in 2005 he was awarded the Premio Nacional de Arte Gráfico for his œuvre.

Frequent exhibitions of his works and their presence in highly renowned international collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, or the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, are testament to the continuing recognition of his work.