MANOLO QUEJIDO: IMMEASURABLE DISTANCE

Manuel Borja-Villel

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Manolo Quejido (b. 1946, Seville) has reflected with indefatigable constancy on the intersections between painting and thinking. In this respect, work with and on painting, understood in all its polysemous broadness, has constituted the main articulating thread of his oeuvre. Perhaps, as Isidro Herrera says, he initially “just wanted to paint,” but in doing so, he found himself painting thoughts, figuratively and literally, and from there he went on to “thinking in paint,” to borrow an expression coined by Paul Cézanne. This (pre)occupation is moreover one he has shared with many other artists, among them his fellow Sevillian Diego de Velázquez, a key referent for any study of Quejido’s work.

The “Velázquez connection” is evident in many respects in Immeasurable Distance, the retrospective exhibition that is now being dedicated to him by the Museo Reina Sofía. In it, and in this accompanying catalogue, the career of Manolo Quejido is surveyed through the analysis of key aspects of his production, such as his early reflections on the problem of correspondence in representation, his investigation of the parameters that set limits for an interior scene, his criticism of what he describes as the “tangle of mediation,” and his metalinguistic pictorial exercises centered on the polysemy of the word “painting” itself. At the same time, it highlights the unity lying behind his “deliberate stylistic plurality in constant metamorphosis.”

This stylistic plurality is already present in his works of the 1970s, when his experimentation with various expressive media like Pop Art, Expressionism, and geometric abstraction led to the creation of series like Siluetas (Silhouettes), Secuencias (Sequences), and Deliriums, which already show us his concept of artistic activity as a constant quest for (self-)knowledge with a certain component of mysticism.

After this initial experimental phase, Manolo Quejido began his Cartulinas (Cardboards) in 1974, and it was then that he started to weigh up the possibility of a return to painting, assuming its expanded condition but always keeping it within recognizable parameters. Beatriz Velázquez, the curator of this exhibition, points out that in these cardboards, whose motifs (objects, human figures, animals, ideas, places) are represented with different degrees of abstraction and naturalism, the thinking/linguistic quality of the pictorial already starts to be emphasized. The image into which the artist pours this duality is that of the pansy, a flower whose Spanish name, pensamiento, also means “thought.” In his Pensamientos series, begun in 1988, Quejido explores the idea of the painter as a tool used by painting to materialize itself through the creation of pictures that often adopt a diagrammatic structure. In them, he represents different painters as pansies, incorporating elements into each of them that allude to the stylistic peculiarities of the referenced artist, and assigning them a particular place in relation to the others, as if the history of painting could be structured as a system of “thoughts.” His interest in diagrammatic structure is made evident by the numerous schemes he concocts on his own oeuvre. In these schemes, as Pablo Allepuz tells us, “he revises, relates, and systematizes the transformations of his plastic production, assigning it and assigning himself a particular place in the tradition of Western painting.”

Over the years, in series like La pintura (Painting, 2002), Nacer pintor (Being Born a Painter, 2006), and Los pintores (The Painters, 2015) and their sustained reflection on thought and painting, he came to substantially center his work on an investigation of the different but contiguous senses of the notions of “painting” / “paint” and “painter.” Manolo Quejido thus confronts us with the indissolubility between the subject that paints, the action carried out, and the object this action gives rise to. This “inextricable concurrence” is perhaps what the artist calls “immeasurable distance,” an expression that gives this exhibition its title, and which alludes to the minute yet vast separation of painting from what is painted, of what is not yet created from the work that has already come into being and taken shape.

Manolo Quejido’s motivation for opting definitively for painting in the late 1970s and early 1980s was his exploration—unequivocally inspired by Velázquez—of the substance and spatiality of painting, and of how to approach and outflank the incursion (or the illusion) of the real on the flat surface of the canvas.

Quejido revisits the picture of Las Meninas both in his series of Reflejos/Espejos (Reflections/Mirrors), of the mid-1980s, and in the Tabiques (Partition Walls), which he painted in the early 1990s. Both are exercises of great formal and conceptual complexity on the representation of an interior space. The pictures of the

Tabiques series are obstinately flat in what we might interpret as a refutation of the possibility of depth that is postulated by Velázquez’s painting. Quejido seems to want to suspend his pictures in the superficiality of the painting, making its two-dimensionality explicit and erasing any effect of thickness and volumetric illusion. His recent interest in the Moebius strip—a continuous surface twisted over itself that has only one side—is a continuation of this research into the possibility of a painting that, in Isidro Herrera’s words, will be “all surface without depth or with a minimum diminishing volume.”

In the mid-1990s, Manolo Quejido also worked on what he describes as a critique of the “generalized mediation” that governs the lives of citizens in contemporary societies. Without abandoning the desire we have just mentioned to make the superficiality of painting explicit, the Sevillian artist makes use in these works of a certain register or quality of veracity. This critique of the “enchantments of mediation” is articulated in very diverse forms in works like Sin consumar (Unconsummated, 1997–99), the series Sin nombre (Without Name, 1997–98), and Leaves left (2010–11), where he uses newsprint as a support. Denouncing the anesthetizing and disciplining function of the media, he tries to turn his painting into a device that speaks to us of the failure of the civilizing project while trapping and confronting us with the unbearable essence of news and images that are traded as if they were merely another consumer item.

Immeasurable Distance offers us an opportunity to enter the multifaceted corpus of schemes that Manolo Quejido has generated in the course of his extensive career. In its retrospective examination of this artist’s work, the show allows us to gain awareness not only of the lucidity and rigor of his artistic investigations but also of their radically critical nature, as it invites us to redefine the parameters from which we think and look at painting and what can (and cannot) be shown and told through it. Perhaps the key to his relevance lies precisely in that capacity to make us think as we look and look as we think.

143 AUTOBIOGRAFÍA

175

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF PAINTING: THE SCHEMES OF MANOLO QUEJIDO, OR HISTORY (ITSELF) AS PERPETUAL SCHEMING Pablo Allepuz García