This is one of the sparest contemporary still lifes in the Banco de España Collection. In the lower half of the canvas, on its central axis, are a realistically depicted egg and a goblet, or its bright shadow, endowed with an evanescent substance. Much of the paint surface is occupied by a flat, dark space that is nevertheless speckled with small white dots that allow glimpses of the weave of the canvas and create a peculiar atmosphere. A horizontal strip of more uniform black at the foot of the canvas seems to serve as a support for these objects, which would otherwise appear to be gravitating in a vacuum. The egg is arranged on this support in such a way that it seems to be detaching itself from the picture surface, as though about to fall off the front into the real space occupied by the viewer. Its situation on this horizontal plane recalls a habitual technique in countless Baroque still lifes. The silent and motionless figures of this Small Blue Still Life, with their austerity and stillness outlined against a dark and silent background, harmonise with the great still life tradition of Zurbarán and Sánchez Cotán.

Two years before painting this picture, in 1967, Hernández Pijuan, one of the foremost Spanish painters of the second half of the twentieth century, confessed to feeling lost in his Informalist investigations, a path which had led him to concentrate especially on the pictorial material. As this interest diminished, he felt increasingly attracted by empty surfaces, deserted spaces, and the need to establish a relationship between objects and such spaces. Objects must have an existence of their own, he reflected, but their balance can only be explained in relation to space. He admits to having finally resolved the problem when he realised that his true material was space itself. This picture is one of the pictorial materialisations of that solution. Hernández Pijuan had just undertaken the execution of a series of still lifes in which the repertoire of objects was limited to just three icons: a pared apple and, as in this case, a goblet and an egg. They were about to announce a return to the traditional still life, but his compositions were detained at the exact point where he ascertained that space was the actual object of the picture. This was a key discovery for his poetics, as Hernández Pijuan was to confess that his greatest and most constant preoccupation had been to convert space into the protagonist of his painting. He thus situates these objects as the focus of attention in large empty spaces, making this type of composition the nerve centre of the mutation that is taking place in his pictorial space. These were familiar objects, invariably painted with realism on dark backgrounds that acquired a metaphysical dimension. They also responded to a need to “retrieve what I had lived, what I knew, what I loved, what was close to me, what I understood.” This limited repertoire was immediately joined by his working tools, “things” that were just as close. The naked presence of the objects encounters the intimate and placid resonance transmitted by the everyday. Unlike other still lifes which he painted in this period, the goblet here is distanced from his naturalist goal to become a kind of light shadow or ungraspable or intangible figure. In any case, they are always very simple objects with a high degree of formal perfection that transmit a sensation of isolation, integrity and exactitude. “I painted these first objects with the purpose of giving a support, as minimally expressive elements, to the monochrome vacuum on which they are situated. They configure boundaries or references to space.” Independently of their essentially pictorial origin, these still lifes by Hernández Pijuan reverberate with the stripped-down atmospheres of some works in the history of painting which give the impression of being traversed by the fluttering of a soul.

The Banco de España Collection holds another work by Hernández Pijuan, Les albes de Segre (1982), an example of his way of suggesting landscapes during a later period in his artistic career by means of a mixture of memory, experience and emotion.

Maite Méndez Baiges

The Collection has two pieces by Joan Hernández Pijuan, which are typical of his oeuvre in the 1960s and in the mid-1980s. The first is one of his more metaphysical paintings, works that presaged the minimalising style (as he liked to call his painting in contrast to the minimal) which would become the hallmark of his artistic career by the end of the 1980s. In those still-lifes, which recall the stark Baroque tradition of Sánchez Cotán, he includes a solitary object in a corner of the canvas. In Small Blue Still-Life (1969) the shadow of a glass can be seen alongside an egg. However, the egg shape is the main feature of the piece: an egg that is about to fall towards us, the area of the immanent; that spatial connection also contains echoes of the Spanish Baroque reminiscent of Caravaggio.

Les albes de Segre (1982) shows the artist’s fondness for the landscape, in this case dawn somewhere in the province of Lérida. In his landscapes, Hernández Pijuan addresses his aesthetic reflections based on his memory of the environment, a memory also taken as experience and emotion. In this regard, he embraces a sentence from the Canadian Agnes Martin, a painter whom he greatly admired: ‘Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my paintings’. Hernández Pijuan argued, in this regard, that painting was a means of knowledge, claiming that when an artist gets to know a path, they must leave it in search of a new one. In this dawn the forms, which almost construct a horizon that divides the surface of the fabric, are subtly perceived, suggesting a haze of greys, whites, ochres and blues and just a hint of the morning to come.

Isabel Tejeda