Joan Hernández Pijuan

Joan Hernández 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.