Turn space into something to be looked at

‘Having a siesta in August, lying in a deckchair, savouring the coffee in the warm shade of the porch, when the heat weighs you down like a slab in the mid-afternoon silence and with only the gentle sea breeze, which is just beginning to be felt, making the blinds beat in a cadential music that accompanies the crickets’ song in the background, in the distant stubble, at the back of the house. At this hour there are no birds. Only that nothingness that accompanies me and helps me enjoy, in an almost suspended time, my own silences.’ (Hernández Pijuan, 2002)

In days of stillness and silence, art offers us the possibility of experiencing self-knowledge. Like the tribute to space and the idea of the empty gaze that Joan Hernández Pijuan brings to his paintings and that he associates with personal experiences such as suspended time.