The landscape is essential in the work of Joan Hernández Pijuan, just as his painting is essentialist.. Of the territories, it is the interior that best represents his spirit of synthesis, far from open horizons and distant panoramas. He finds the expression of nature in the oak tree or the plowed fields, and transforms them into signs that both retain the reference and become only drawings on the painted support, and just like the tree, the house or the flower condense into its morphology a symbiosis of painting and landscape. The series dedicated to the landscapes of La Segarra accentuated this predilection for the territory deep in the Mediterranean, and it is in tribute to this proximity that the exhibition presented at Espai Guinovart, which includes both Segarra landscapes, has been titled "Terres de Ponent" like works from the series dedicated to Morocco in 1991 and 1992.

The artist's ability to grasp space has meant that the choice of the 16 selected works responded to a physical criterion of relationship between some paintings and others, all supported by paper, which maintain a rhythm and a correspondence to the surroundings of the space they occupy.

He begins his Western vision with two works from the Segarra landscape series, "Drawing on white" from 1989. and "Tree and house" from 1990, examples of iconography applied to a surface dominated by the. white and its transparencies and sensitive suggestions, structured by the simple shapes of the profile of the tree and the house that integrate into this mental landscape where the drawing acts as a delimitation and structuring of the painting. They are works of considerable format that recall the dimension that the author gives to the drawing, as an extension of the painting as well.

Josep Miquel Garcia
August 1997