Joan Hernández Pijuan (1931-2005, Barcelona, SP) is one of the major milestones in modern Spanish painting. His loyalty to certain themes, such as space, memory and landscape, have endowed Hernandez Pijuan's oeuvre with a rare solidity and durability.
Joan Hernández Pijuan started painting during the sixties with a style related to expressionism. He resorts to a memory exercise, to his childhood's landscape in Folquer, to recreate it synthetically in his painting. The colours chosen for his monochrome surfaces are those of nature. An impression of light, a temperatura, are employed to evoke the sensations produced by the changing reality of the landscape.
In the landscapes of the 70s he began seeking expresiveness in the whole work rather than in the detail of the brushstroke. These landscapes were sections of familiar landscapes defined by shades of color, by the movement of air or light and "the image of space" became central to his work; "The real problem was to find a space that was the total protagonist of the picture, a space of something lived in and not one (...) in which the stroke was placed on a background, on a surface I would call inactive".
