The year 1980, when Participating in Nature was produced, was an extraordinarily fruitful time for Manuel Hernández Mompó. His copious output that year reflected his finding of a fully articulated pictorial voice, characterised by the recognisable white light of the Mediterranean (along Spain’s eastern seaboard) and a certain joie de vivre. These aspects were influenced by Sorolla and were celebrated by drawings that lie somewhere between imaginary language, signs, doodles and figures reduced to their bare essence. It was also a time when his desire to expand his painting into more daring formats was plain: the large size of Participating in Nature, at nearly three metres high, makes it practically unique in Mompó’s career. It is the largest canvas in the career of an artist who tended to use smaller paper or fabric formats. This not only shows a robust and pictorial heroism on his part but stems from a firm decision related to his urge to expand, with a certain obsession to ‘open up’ the limits of painting in relation to the pantheistic theme chosen for this work. It depicts nature as a system in which one can take part, a sort of compendium of his earlier interests, related to beach scenes, gentle landscapes in different atmospheric conditions and characters that evolve and harmoniously relate in festive settings, but shows them in more abstract, uncluttered terms. The work shows a greater dilution of form, influenced by his interest in philosophy and alternative forms of spirituality such as those he soaked up from reading Tao Te Ching or the writings of Jiddu Krihnamurti, which look at how human beings take part in the life cycle and the natural order.

Mompó’s works in general convey a feeling of biological communion between human beings in their context, with their ecosystem, through the white background which becomes a hallmark of his work and the ‘aether’ of fertility that enables creatures to coexist. In that context, Participating in Nature is a statement piece, a late-period expression of a certain way of understanding and approaching the cosmos as a chaotic yet friendly, inhabitable space governed by an invisible harmony. In 1984, Mompó reflected in these terms on that expansive nature that his work embraced from the late 1970s onwards as he searched for an increasingly less limited space. That search would lead him to experiment with Perspex as a provisional way of eliminating the limit of the pictorial medium: ‘I am continuing with larger formats. I want the white of the backgrounds of the canvases to be space. On that space, as on a stage, I want things to happen, to be alive, to move, to change. [...] A couple of years ago, I found a transparent medium that overrode the painted white of the surface and seeing the colours and forms in mid-air meant that they were released from the limited space [...]. The latest one, from 1982, is twenty-seven metres square.’

Carlos Martín