Strength and Subtlety - The Artist Duo José Antonio Menéndez-Hevia & Nina Grønn

Menendez Hevia (1938) and Nina Grønn (1974) met each other in 2003, in Gijón. Until 2018, they have lived and worked together. At the beginning they did a lot of fieldwork, traveling around Spain. This shared journey is based on experiencing nature concluding with formal and technical research.

 Hevia's know-how allowed them to explore several kinds of possibilities with different materials and industrial procedures, creating new innovations. As well as Kandinsky, they control the potential of “point and line to plane” in the pictorial space through the texture, scale and interaction.

The duo of Jose Antonio Menéndez Hevia and Nina Grønn could be compared to Picasso and Braque during the first period of Cubism. Even though they share the same artistic discipline, the result depends on their previous experiences and characters.

They have an experimental atelier, although its methodology differs greatly from the traditional workshop. Based on observation, their atelier intends to widen the artist’s perception by continuous interaction between the senses interpreting experiences in encounters with nature and transferring them to the esthetic sphere.

The result of their artwork brings to our mind Duchamp's term “infrathin”, as it explores the lightness of visual and mental sensations causing an apparently trivial experience of reality. In this sense, the concept of “infrathin” is related to Rothko's “Veil Painting”, which whom shares this mysticism of color and texture being a constant in their artwork.

The final abstraction, profoundly interiorized and organic, is conceived as a philosophy, based on knowledge, discovery and reflection. This theoretical base filtered mentally and physically, reflects an artwork of a sublime delicacy. The nature is latent, living in plastic forms; underlying the origin and the result. 

Due to the experiential richness of the work and their refined mastery of the visual language, their art works well in a big scale as well as in a smaller form, having a powerful impact in color as well as in black and white.

Oviedo, Tuesday, December 7th, 2012 

Aida Puente Toraño

Department of Art History and Musicology

University of Oviedo