Alaró III

Manuel Hernández Mompó’s work reflects the world around him. The tangible reality, with its streets, people and rnarkei is turned into an impression in his paintings. lf his work in ti 1960s can be understood as that of a creator of atmosphere in the 1970s his compositions tended towards a marked schematisation. The characters that had flooded his painting until then, testimony to the artist’s interest in capturing ti living and the everyday, are reduced to a series of precise strokes and signs. In his canvases from this period, the white backgrounds, a reminder of the Mediterranean light of his native Valencia, and the taste for colour that distinguishes ti artist within a generation interested in capturing the dramatic vein of historical events in red, white and black, are still present. In short, his canvases show an abundance of joie de vivre and his work is a positivist commitment to the human being.

In 1977, Hernández Mompó took his highly personal language a step further. Trying to eliminate the white preparation the canvas requires, he began to use a transparent support that would lead him to work in sculpture. The transition to three-dimensionality allowed him, as he said in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Juana Mordó Gallery dedicated to these works, to free forms and coloursfrom the limited space. When the artist moved to a small village in the interior of the island of Mallorca, he tackled a more complex use of these surfaces: working on several of them, he joined them together inside a glass cube on a metal plate. These compositions, entitled Alaró after the Mallorcan village where they were painted, abandon the static white background and transfer the characters of the painter’s world to the viewer’s space. Likewise, in contrast to the work on canvas, the use of several interrelated methacrylate sheets generates multiple viewpoints when approaching each of these pieces. Again, in the artist’s words: the painted scenes are integrated into the real space and the surprise [ … ] brings us closer to the positive play of dialogue.

The Alaró series was a determining factor in Hernández Mompó’s production. The schematisation achieved and the fluency acquired by freeing himself from the background impacted him when he worked again on canvas. In this way, his paintings from the late seventies and early eighties attained a total freedom that would characterise his mature language.

Inés Vallejo