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Pragmatic Mystic: The Paintings of Pasqual Hijuelos

By Joel Silverstein

I have known Jose Pascual Hijuelos for more than 40 years so it is with great pleasure that I introduce him and his works from 2009 - 2013.

Pascual was my first important art teacher, mentor and always my friend. A self-professed abstract painter, Pascual has produced a significant body of figurative art much like the early members of the New York School. This skill and knowledge imbues his abstract paintings with a particular kind of confidence and the evocative qualities of experience as shaped within abstract form. I remember an early studio discussion we had during the 1970’s when he was finishing a series of silver acrylic paintings constructed with heavy gel. He related that the dull luster of the metallic paint and corrugated structures of the surface represented the oblique qualities of reality and a secularized art experience as near to eternity as one could get in this life. At the time I was 17 and totally unprepared for this elegant and existential statement.

In his own youth, Pascual was the studio assistant to the painter, Al Held. This fact is compelling, because Held holds a unique place in the New York School. Unlike Clement Greenberg inspired formalist painters who carefully presented the flatness of the picture plane, Held introduced complex architectural forms into abstraction and predated all kinds of space evoking television, movies and even computer screens years before anyone else. For Pascual, this signified that abstraction could convey all kinds of spaces and meanings. Pascual’s interests ran to earlier kinds of Modernism; clean geometric painters like Ben Nicholson in England or the Russian Constructivists like Kazimir Malevich and Vladimir Tatlin. There is also the legacy of Pablo Picasso to contend with, a titanic figure and king of the art world at the time. Picasso’s work thrilled Pascual because he did precisely what he wished to do in the realm of art. The masculine aggression, stylistic shifts and frank creativity was something that Pascual could not easily shrug off; direct, palpable and primordial. Pascual’s own Cuban background also linked him to other Spanish abstractionists like Francis Picabia and Juan Gris, masters of form who used browns, grays and blacks within a particular Spanish vocabulary replete with echoes of Magic Realism filtered through Cubism.

Pascual refers to himself as a Minimalist, recalling the painting movement of the 1960’s-70s in that he has refined his vocabulary to a few simple forms. Yet his current abstract paintings embody almost every kind of space existent in the history of art. Flat plains and shapes are carefully placed on a singular expanse of exquisite tone. At other times, he uses rectangles as window motifs metaphorically looking upon other realms. In his most recent works he has come upon an evocative veil shape, much like a curtain or a cloth. This particular shape recalls the great figurative traditions of the Spanish Baroque painters, like Francisco de Zurbaran and Giuseppe (Jose de)Ribera, both artists whom early modernists rediscovered and loved for their somber tonalities and fractured psychological spaces. These figurative artists with religious content can easily be understood as formal precursors to Pascual’s own metaphysical abstraction, both styles suggesting other realms and realities. For Pascual, abstract art represents a particular conundrum. It is truly an embodiment of the phenomenological experience, how you walk through a space and encounter objects. On the other hand he presents a rarified spiritual encounter that cannot be named, because it evokes the glimpse of a world that is not lived or remembered. His clean form and burnished accumulated surfaces approximate the kind of space in medieval icon painting or the climax in Stanley Kubrick’s movie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey ( 1968); strange, yet strangely familiar.

The duality of the paintings and drawings make me understand Pascual’s love of Picasso even if they are formally dissimilar artists. Picasso always evokes both the ancient and the modern. His most extreme mythological motifs and symbols are based on the experiences and observations of his own life, thus grounding every painting with a solid point of entry for the viewer. Likewise in the most abstract of Pascual’s works, there is a similar transformational quality that pivots on experience. A visionary progression is created by the radically paring down the form. This paring down is almost devotional in its intent, a mystical utopian quality emerging from a mute and stubborn pragmatism. It is the dichotomy of the spiritual and the pragmatic, so easily reconciled in Baroque times and so unresolved in our own that offers a profound viewing experience as well as a philosophical dialogue for the contemporary viewer. In a modern way, the abstract “non-object “qualities of the work paradoxically remind the viewer of his or her own life with all its everyday complexities, but also a vision of a world apart and a glimpse into the unknown. That’s what makes the works of Jose Pascual Hijuelos, so appealing and bold, simple and deceptive. His entire oeuvre suggests a particular kind of revelation and a delight in mastery of craft. He lets us know in no uncertain terms that the essential is always more than what we know, but not more that we can imagine.

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