Joan Hernández Pijuán is a key figure in the artistic panorama of the 20th century. Founder of the Sílex (Flint) Group, his vision of the plastic arts proves to be unmistakeable in compositions and uniform planes on which he draws reticles, zigzagging figures or elements of the landscape such as clouds and mountains. A strict range of blacks, grays and greens completes the distinguishing characteristics of an author who reinterprets reality with his beautiful images without horizon, but always maintaining his abstract roots.

Paris marked the beginning of Hernández Pijuán’s creative journey. There he came into contact with Informalism that dominated the 1950s, although his early creations were closer to an expressionism with a figurative tone. From that time on, his palette began to shrink while at the same time he emphasized chromatic contrast until his style culminated in a language of simplicity more apparent than real. He approached the landscape painter that he would end up being, a landscape painter who strove to create the feeling of the landscape rather than its images.

Joan Hernández Pijuán became an absolute master in the mid 1970s, when the influence of Land Art, Support-surface and artists such as Mark Rothko blazed the trail for a creator who would maintain his own solid personality from that time until his death. This man who started out as an eminently intuitive painter ended up in spatial-type composition. The object becomes a mere reference of the power of space and the brushstroke disappears in the name of purity.

Hernández Pijuán’s work is present in collections as important as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the National Gallery of Canada or the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. His paintings, so full of sensuality, the fruit of the analysis of the tangible, will be conserved in these museums. Hernández Pijuán only wanted to paint what he saw, touched and lived so as not to fall into mental lucubration, something that he was absolutely opposed to.