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Joan Hernández Pijuan |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Tuesday, the 10th of September 2002 an exhibition with works of the Spanish artist Joan Hernández Pijuan. It is the second extensive solo-exhibition of the artist at the gallery – for the first time his œuvre was presented in this exhibition-room in autumn 2000. The current exhibition will provide an insight into the last creations of the painter by showing middle- and large sized paintings in oil on canvas and works on paper which has been almost entirely produced within the last year.
Joan Hernández Pijuan was born in Barcelona in 1931. From 1952 to 1956 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sant Jordi in Barcelona to which he came back as an lecturer in 1976. Beside his successful artwork he gave courses and lectures and finished his dissertation about the subject “Painting and Space. A Personal Experience“ in 1988. Since 1989 he had a professorship in painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona; 1992 he became a dean. Pijuan lives and works in Barcelona and at his country estate in Folquer.
Hernàndez Pijuan’s oils range between drawing and painting. Its colours seem to be derived from the landscape near to his country estate in Folquer: The monochrome shades are reminding of the dark yellow of the cornfields, the white, the white-yellow or white-grey of the glistening sun, the green of the leaves or the earthy ochre, brown-red and black of the earth at this landscape. The paint is applied with a spatula on the canvas in several, thick layers; this way vivid and plastic fields of colour are generated, where the repainted layers are still recognisable at the edges. In these monochrome fields of paint signs are set with a few strokes: wavy lines, circles and points, but also flowers and houses – similar to pictograms constructed of a few lines – deeply scratched into the oil paint in order to reveal the below layers of paint.
The main subject of the artist is landscape. This term has to be understood in broader sense, it means nature and cultivated landscape as well. Beside figural motifs as pathways, outlines of hills, furrows and plants also architectural motifs are to be found, e.g. the often used rhombs as a detail of moorish buildings. The colour of the paintings also expresses both: the colours of nature and the colour of the murals and bricks of buildings.
Pijuan’s paintings seem to be inspired by the atmosphere of the certain Spanish landscape. Thus the constellations of colours, layers and lines in Pijuan’s paintings become metaphors of perception and basic human experience. Pijuan is not interested in the reproduction of his environment but in the commemorative essence of an impression of a landscape composed of the subjective apperception of a certain place. Different terms and conditions as mood, season or weather are joined with the perception of land as an elemental experience of human beings: landscape as a land, where men live, feed on and feel at home but also having its own rules due to the power of nature and therefore concealing dangers and secrets: primary feelings or memories, that are initiated by the reduced form and colour of Pijuan’s paintings, which the artist shares with the spectator.
His paintings are deeply poetic and calm and invite to contemplation, but at the same time they are also very radical almost provocative. It is the radicalness of a simplification which brings forth a striking density. Pijuan developed with a few means a picture language, which enables him to express a rich content of perceptions.
Since the 60s his works are represented in various Spanish and international museums, e.g. in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. There were several extensive exhibitions of his œuvre in the last decade, for example 1993 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, 1999 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and about his graphic œuvre at the Rupertinum in Salzburg in 2000. From 2003 to 2004 the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) organzises a copious retrospective touring exhibition through Europe.
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