Although Manuel Hernández Mompó is usually considered part of the abstract generation of the 1950s, his work has close ties to figuration.

Hernández Mompó invented a personal language that encompasses a private universe, in which the artist recreated the world around him, with its streets and its people, and transferred it to the canvas as an impression. His work is that of a creator of atmospheres that sum up the reflection of his surroundings. Consequently, his paintings are filled with characters and landscapes schematically rendered on the pictorial surface as signs, symbols and words.

Hernández Mompó studied at the San Carlos School of Fine Arts in Valencia. As soon as he heard that the Spanish-French border had reopened, he set out for Paris to discover contemporary art at first-hand. After returning to Spain, the urge to travel became increasingly strong, and he spent long periods abroad in Italy and the Netherlands. Back in Madrid, he joined the group of artists that had congregated around Juana Mordó's gallery. In 1968 he presented twelve large-format works in the Spanish Pavilion at the 34th Venice Biennale. After spending long periods on Ibiza, in the 1970s he settled on Mallorca, where he also began to sculpt.

Hernández Mompó's works are marked by a commitment to white, a tribute to the Mediterranean light of his native Valencia, and by the use of colour. As a result, his paintings are bursting with joy, making this artist difficult to classify within his generation. At a time marked by Franco's repressive measures, the abstract painters of the 1950s, many of whom were close friends of the Valencian artist, used a palette basically limited to white, black and red. In contrast to the dramatic effect achieved by this approach, Hernández Mompó's positivist attitude identified him as an independent artist.

Within his output, works on paper were a format that gave the artist a special sense of freedom. As the two gouaches in the Banco Santander Collection clearly show, that freedom led him to combine different media (watercolour, charcoal, crayons, etc.) with one thing in common: they could all be applied rapidly. This fluidity turned the paper into a final format: finished works that share, like his canvases, in what the artist called "the inhabited murmur of nature".

The late 1960s, when the canvas Gente en el campo [People in the Countryside] was painted, was a key period in his career. The universe described above had evolved into an artistic language that allowed him to summarise reality in a few rapid strokes. Closely related to the works that Hernández Mompó created for the Spanish Pavilion in Venice, this canvas seems to prefigure a later practice. The pictorial surface is divided into a series of squares which contain, as the artist himself once said, "[...] all that ALIVENESS of the ordinary and everyday". The compartmentalisation of the entire space of the work into smaller parts would later give way, in the 1970s, to the practice of collage. [Inés Vallejo]