BARCELONA.- Fundació Suñol presents "The Measurement of Time: The Course of Painting" a monographic exhibition that goes through the career of Catalan artist Joan Hernández Pijuan (1931-2005). The exhibition shows a series of works –including unreleased pieces- from different periods, through which the visitor will have to discover the tension, density and intensity used by Joan Hernández Pijuan as the starting point for his creations, and especially, as a reference of his personal process of observing nature.

The Josep Suñol Collection hosts a great number of representative works of this artist, which complemented with other pieces, show us the way through which Joan Hernández Pijuan understood, practiced and loved art. The exhibition consists of more than forty works done between the end of the sixties and 2005.

In the works from the sixties, objects like rulers, set squares, glasses, scissors, apples, eggs, etc. stand out. They are still lifes that already show many details that will leave their marks on his pictorial journey. They are objects arranged on the canvas with a strong intentionality, removed from conventional composition, determining where the object fits into the empty space, in a meditated metaphysical dimension.

Nevertheless, although these still lifes may be conceptual, Joan Hernández Pijuan is an objectual painter, since in his "approach" to painting a more corporeal, more physical aspect always prevailed. This apprehension of the subject in his painting will be the vehicle for communication, as we will see in his rapport with the total density of Nature, which will be the only main figure as the objects (still lifes) disappear. Then we will be left only with the surface, the dimension of the space.

Nature has always been a recurring theme throughout history. Showing it starkly, as it does Hernández Pijuan is much more complicated than using it as a background or complement. A premeditated absence of figures and/or objects in a scene where time is passing and is full of activity inexorably leads us to the conclusion that nature moves by itself; it is independent from humankind, and so we just evolve in it.

Hernández Pijuan’s work takes part of a continuum which considers nature as a container, a classifier, whose measure is not stable and which is too vast to catalogue, affirming that the Book of Nature has no end.