Manolo Quejido, at night

Madrid,

Two years ago, precisely on this date, we attended the presentation of “Distance without measure” at the Velázquez Palace, a retrospective of the Sevillian Manolo Quejido organized by the Reina Sofía Museum that reviewed his interests and obsessions facing the challenge that is this a very prolific author with a career as coherent as it is diverse, with a heterogeneity that is part of his essence. Now it is the Helga de Alvear Gallery that shows us his recent compositions, dated between 2016 and the present, in which keys survive in his production that were already very evident in that other Madrid exhibition: the analysis of the relationship between thought and act creative, between idea and action; the vibrant brushstrokes, a lively chromaticism and traces of pop art and Equipo 57 that have never defined him, but have always survived on his canvases.

Also of interest to this artist – who went to the Complutense Computing Center in the early seventies, but left it soon, given its normative strictures – are the conventions associated with the romantic notion of genius and the genealogy of the pictorial discipline in yes, this axis of constant analysis and conceptualizations in his career without textual elements prevailing in his pieces.

His way of approaching the act of painting is absolutely distanced from the classic representation of the author and the model, in which a distance is established between the creator and what is painted, to attend to a convergence between the creative act and its fruits; in works such as those that make up the series Partitions, PF either IPthe first with evident Velazque evocations, also studies surfaces and depths: the canvas can be opaque, but it can also reflect, opening doors to other spaces and denying distances between the interior and the exterior. Even in his early canvases, which might have something of a traditional window, the figures are blurred; His images can also be interpreted, in the way that Ignacio Gómez de Liaño did, as painted poems.

If in Velázquez’s brilliant image the elements of the exercise of painting are exposed in their complexity, in Quejido’s we will find them in the jets of light and in the products of representation (painting, sculpture, or the human figure itself in a threshold but incorporeal, alluding to the tricks that said representation contains): artist, work and act of painting, rather than being more or less intimately linked, are for Quejido painting in themselves (and can be born or exhausted with it, perhaps to return to begin).

To his painter background, paintershas dedicated series such as 30 bulbs and The black thoughtsin which he associated each link of the set with the way of working of authors of the past, from Piero della Francesca to Warhol, passing again through the essential Velázquez, Ingres, Goya, Cézanne or Picasso. These artists composed a diagram oriented according to the evolution of the history of painting, but also conceived as a system to determine some possible ways of dealing with the support, a resource that they also used in Diamond (1992), where that historical map becomes… precisely painting.

In an ironic sense, in relation to the controversy of whether creators are born or made, Quejido also devised the series Born paintera kind of resurrection (or detonation), from the comic resources, of his previous radiant paintings, in which he interprets each new composition as an enlightenment (of the painter, of work, of action).

He explained in 2022 at the Retiro that, after his journey of almost five decades, he found himself at that time, and for the first time, painting without a route, peering into a certain abyss; one of the large-format canvases on the tour contained, precisely, the word END and registration Painting has an endless ending (that inscription of Endless we will read it in Helga de Alvear too, like that of Ce qu’il reste à dire). In any case, he continues to work largely as a path of resistance to the weight of history and cruelties, proclaiming, as written in another of his works, the lightness of laughing, playing and dancing.