These books are a compilation of the series of works that I have been working on in recent years.
PURPLE BOOK
Canto Fortuna is a series of paintings that deal with destiny. In my works I start with an idea; a study which inevidablly go through various changes and ends completely diffirent from when I started. Although I feel like I am in complete control it never plays out the way I planned.
“Fate shuffles the cards and we play.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
BLACK BOOK
A few years ago I decided to start writing about my work. Initially my intention was to give the viewers who follow me an idea of how and why I paint. To my surprise I realized that by writing about my work not only was I offering insights into my creative world but I was concretizing feelings that I had harbored for a long time but never verbalized.
My work is not meant to be philosophical or conceptual. It is not endeavour to change the world. It is not social or political commentary and it is not narrative. It is an attempt to create an elusive moment through the use of colour and shapes. So with that in mind my writing is an effort to inform the viewer about some basic art concepts so they can better appreciate my work and understand what goes on in my world.
BLUE BOOK
This series was created by the artist Pascual Hijuelos between 2020 and 2022; a frantic period of global pandemic, lockdown, and political unrest. During that time, Pascual actively sought a painterly analog to our own problematic era. An abstract painter with a religious upbringing, he has always displayed a strong penchant for mysticism. Geometric abstraction is often coolly logical. However, in this artist’s hands, rigid form becomes transcendent symbol, and wholly mysterious. Shapes evoke windows, doors, and celestial bodies, levitating and dematerializing in spellbinding ways.
GREEN BOOK
Pascual Hijuelos possesses a poetic plasticity that resides in each of his works, where energy is materialized in the form of pictoral mysticism.
In his work, he seeks to rid himself of representation in order to turn it into an inner act, making the artwork a sensitive object without stripping it of weight and center, of order and consciousness as a reflection of his artistic will. His work is a threshold, reminiscent of a symbolic horizon or landscape with expansive properties.
A master of abstraction, he achieves allegories and symbols manifested in a constant interchange between the inner and the outer, between forces, gravity, and ether. These tensions are a latent duality, therefore his aesthetic discourse, in addition to being structural, is volatile, with an intention of transcendence in a mystical sense, filled with silence.
RED BOOK
To enter the world of Pascual Hijuelos’ paintings is to find the door to a world of seductive dreams. In viewing the first of his images there is an initial suggestion of something that flickers over the surfaces that defies you to focus on anything but the overall picture, but eventually Pascual initiates a clarity towards a more or- dered vision. Order is what gives structure to his visual idioms, the organic to him is chaos. The act of painting is a rational, thought-out process. Instinct at this point in his career is to be trusted.
YELLOW BOOK
There is no pretense of subtlety in Pascual Hijuelos’ art. The geometric forms that ap- pear in the foreground of his works are always frontal, direct, colliding or on the verge of colliding. His compositions visually assault the spectator, energized with rhythms and tensions that Pascual deliberately creates with great mastery.