NO DISTANCE FROM THE IMMEASURABLE Isidro Herrera

Thinking about Painting

How could it be otherwise? Our reflection will start with Las Meninas, a picture that probably comes from as many cogitations as those it offers the viewer who stands expectantly in front of it. Not forgetting that we are trying to think together with QUEJIDO, the conceptual QUEJIDO who transfers his genuinely pictorial thoughts to the dilated field of painting, giving it a place and form on the thinking side of his painter-thoughts.

Informed as we are—in passing, we should say—of the “V-Q connection,” we look to Velázquez with a view to teasing it out (pp. 190–191). On the acrylic where that connection is announced, it is not hard to distinguish the symmetry and identify, on one side—the “V” side—a blue figure traversing a black plane with a red floor and ceiling to reach the part defined by a frontal plane containing three colors (blue, red, and black, in the hexachromatic code of QUEJIDO, VELÁZQUEZ). At the same time, emerging on the other side—the “Q” side—is a black figure traversing a green plane, also with a red floor and ceiling, while the frontal plane contains black, yellow, and red (which with the green of the exit plane gives us the chromatic set that identifies QUEJIDO). The economy reigning in the picture reduces the action to the simultaneity of the simple entrance of a figure at one end (the “V” side) and the equally simple exit of another figure at the other end (the “Q” side). To this we must add the slight insinuation of a perspective that leaves the sensation of a certain depth, and so the existence of an inner volume. Immediately, the questions rush up like pet animals. Where are they going in? Where are they coming out? This is an inside of which we know absolutely nothing owing to the outside that hides it from us with its impenetrable flatness. To jump that gap, we shall resort to a stratagem, albeit unsatisfactory, and create a plausible fiction to enlighten us on what is for now perfectly obscure and enclosed. According to our fiction, in that room or inner volume, there is a picture: Las Meninas, the original. There is no light and we can barely make it out in the shadow.

The lack of light in its turn cancels out the light of the interior of the picture, and gone too are the perspectives (linear and aerial), the volume, and even the famous air reigning in its interior. Also lost are the signs that indicated what was happening in there, and it is not possible either to identify any of the figures we know to be found in it. What remains of all that? On a black plane with no relief, something rather like phosphenes (and so originating in our own eyes), deposited on the picture surface, adopt the form of restless and playful phantoms that seem to leap or quiver between two (white) shadows which, inside the picture as spectators, incorporate its outside. They are covered in a single blue sheet, flat and conveniently holed so that each figure will still be able to gaze at what it is gazing at, floating undramatically in what looks like a puppet theater that has opened the door to performance, allowing its puppets to burst in.

QUEJIDO, the painter of the “V-Q connection,” thus leaves the place of his experience with a version of Las Meninas in which very little remains of the original except for the visual memory of a reinterpretation where we now unequivocally recognize his maniera, for here the connection joining them is a living one: a QUEJIDO in a state of VerazQues (pp. 70–72).

But let us not go so fast, and return to Las Meninas, the original. There, in many ways, is VELÁZQUEZ himself looking at us each time we look at him, perhaps holding the answers to all the questions the painting can give rise to. In his picture, he presents himself grandeur nature, at our size, telling us above all not who he is (that is what the artist’s signature is for) but what he is. What is he? Philosophical pragmatism teaches us that behind that question is nothing but a “what does he do?” We know without a doubt that this is a painter. He is a painter. His two hands hold the two characteristic tools of his trade, the palette and the brush. Kitted out before us is an artisan, a manual laborer. A succession of gestures—what now we would call his body language—indicate his undissimulated pride at doing what he does without hidden shame: paint.

However, we must also notice that this arrogant manual laborer not only displays his hands but also bears a distinctive sign, the only explicit sign in the picture: the Cross of Santiago. It is a sign of social affiliation as a knight of the Order of Santiago, a noble title granted by the king himself, and the distinction with which VELÁZQUEZ culminates his career, and we know it to have been the source of anecdotes concerning its presence on the breast of the gown VELÁZQUEZ wears to form part of the picture and be recognized by the viewer. But that sign says something about its bearer that ought to interest us infinitely more. It says that the person wearing it does not earn his living with his work, that the work in question does not consist of filling in surfaces or decorating walls, and that what its bearer does is not a servile task—for how can someone who literally works miracles, like converting two dimensions into a space of three, be a servant? It also says that his hands, in spite of their immediate contact with the material, are not belittled by this, but that they necessarily assist in a much higher activity of a truly intellectual nature. It might be said that those hands not only paint, but that as they paint, and by virtue of painting, they work through thought and, in their own manner, they think.

All those who interpreted that this conquest of painting as an intellectual activity led to the subordination of the hand to the foundational intellect failed to notice that the conditions were in fact being created for its imminent autonomy (something else, it is true, was needed to achieve this: the painter’s own concept of his nothingness and lack of selfhood imbued in the work). We shall therefore immediately cease to believe that the painter’s mind thinks and orders what the hand subsequently carries out in obedience. This does not happen. Only those hands, those of VELÁZQUEZ, the holders of palette and brush, can perform the task of painting what they paint as part of an activity that nobody would any longer call simply material, but most certainly intellectual (or, to use the words of VELÁZQUEZ’s strict contemporary, Descartes, it would be res cogitans), where there has to be an indissoluble composition of mind and hand (matter and spirit, all one, something that Descartes would no doubt find repugnant, but not some of his followers), and where, while the mind remains uniform, what gives its singular nature to the product of the exercise of painting is precisely the intervention of that hand, inseparable from the intellectual activity in which it is itself immersed. The hand paints, therefore the hand thinks. Or to put it another way, the hands of the painter paint, while the hand of the painter thinks.

And here we have it that QUEJIDO, knowing this, starts to go over the successive painting-thoughts that have preceded him, finding himself confronted by what is probably his prime motive for painting. Perhaps he just wanted to paint, but when he did so, he found himself painting thoughts, and then went on to thinking painting, as so many others that QUEJIDO tirelessly enumerates have done in their way, composing a history of thought where all those who are named in it are painters: painters painted as thoughts and indistinctly painters thought as “paintments.” For with the passage of time, a backstep to that of painting, long after CÉZANNE coined the formula of “thinking in paint,” QUEJIDO will come here in front of us to condense that intertwining of pintar (paint) and pensar (think) into a single line, which he sets out himself in a highly significant way, P I E N T S AR, even to be read with all of its letters in some of his works (pp. 96–97).

A Hand of Paint

The hand of the painter thinks. It thinks painting. Aren’t we taking things a little too far? If we were going to privilege an organ, wouldn’t the eye be more worthy of this intellectual recognition than the hand? Let us focus, however, on a remarkable circumstance: the eye perceives what the painted picture shows. Thus, for example, the eye looks toward the picture (of QUEJIDO) and in a glance, without trying to be in the least exhaustive:

— [the eye] forms an idea of what this or that picture means, of its message (for example, the painting that inverts places and values to cover the exterior and the interior of the exterior of a can of paint with its layer of paint);

— [the eye] understands what its figures represent (a naiad, some bathers, a painter, etc., each in its own way);

— [the eye] registers that its colors form a code (being mixed together so that their combination will signal the presence of a certain number of painters, including QUEJIDO himself);

— [the eye] poses itself questions about the different and very varied supports of paint: walls, doors, canvases (canvases-withinthe-canvas, painted white inside the picture in readiness to be painted), reflections in a mirror, thresholds, crossings of light and shadow, successive and superimposed planes, all of which are the protagonists of the works, more even than the animate or inanimate beings who occupy them. Distance enables the appearance of interiors or exteriors where a strange game of lines, planes, forms, and colors is played, often within a fraught calm, restless reflections at the back of a mirror, blurs that are still more significant than if what is affected by them had been shown clearly.

[the eye], finally, at the peak of abstraction of which it is capable, sees how deployed on the canvas is that single surface containing a dimension that is impossible for it (the illusory space of a series of planes arranged to form a strange and apparently three-dimensional cube, actually two-dimensional but conceptually and geometrically one-dimensional, with a name of its own: Moebius Q-vista).

All this is unearthed, it seems to us, by an intellectual eye equipped with a perspicacity capable of recognizing something common to so many very different pictures. That commonality which runs through the pictures identified as by… (for example, QUEJIDO) is generally called the hand of the painter. More intuitive than reflexive or reflected, it is here that the trademark of the painted resides, its signature beyond its name. That “hand” which carries its stamp is seen. It forms part of what at first sight is alien to vision, yet the eye sees it unerringly. But just when it seems we are about to proclaim the kingdom of the eye, the roles are suddenly reversed: it is not the eye that rules over the hand and makes it visible, but the other way around. It is the hand that imposes itself on the eye, directs it toward it, and, through its stamp visibly imprinted on the canvas, really looks outward, this time from the pure painted surface. It is not that the painter’s hand can be seen, it is that it demands to be seen, capturing the gaze and dominating it. The painter’s hand expands alongside it, saying or dictating what has to be seen. A hand, the painter’s hand, that speaks in its language to an eye that understands it? No, not a hand that speaks, but a hand that through its own solely pictorial means thinks and leaves its thought in the transparency it has managed to create and place in front of us, the viewers.

The first distorting element in an understanding of what is “happening” to the painting is, in my view, the supposition that it expresses itself as a class of “speech,” and that to discern what it is proposing, it is therefore necessary to receive its message, to listen to it—even with the eye, as Paul Claudel suggested—and to decipher it in the manner of a written text, a kind of writing. However, the existence of a hand that thinks, which—as QUEJIDO has said so many times—is not that of the painter but that of painting itself, brings with it a problem that goes further than that of its will to express and express itself, to allow itself to be “read” or offer itself up for “interpretation.” Watching it maneuver on and from the canvas, we are witnesses to something perfectly unreadable and inexpressible that comes with it, open nonetheless to the (old) paradox of the (im)possibility of reading the unreadable or expressing the inexpressible.

As long as it is only expressive, that hand moves in the realm of language and its meaning. When it attends to the inexpressive of which it is a vehicle, it automatically situates itself outside the domain of a linguistic code, and so overflows the clichéd concept of painting as a language spoken with the purpose of being deciphered by somebody. In passing, it is enriched by that lost possibility. The hand of painting, liberated from the obligation to be ultimately expressive, imposes and self-imposes: it imposes as an imposing figure imposes, it imposes as a desire to command and give orders, and it imposes itself as an affirmation of its autonomous existence. Painting responds to the hand that thinks.

Painting as a work of thought will have been one of the essential contributions of QUEJIDO and his kind (those whom he has himself figured as “PENSAMIENTOS,” or “THOUGHTS,” pp. 100–101), since thinking is obviously not the same as expressing, and has to do first with respect for a prior demand for congruence, for moving in a space of coincidence, reciprocity, and community. Present in its action, but unexpressed and inexpressive. When the thinker and the painter set about thinking, what will they do to make the inexpressible appear, not as something expressed but as something inexpressive in its very inexpressivity? For now, the answer we presage is that the painter, thinking of painting, imposing his imposing hand and setting the visible in order, comes to create—as VELÁZQUEZ argued in defense of his full right to wear his Cross—comes to create, we repeat, a work of thought.

The inexpressible that painting cannot cease to carry with it creates a zone of unexpressed dilatation of painting. On the basis of that zone, a priori impossible to situate, one reaches an understanding of painting’s “expanded” field. We shall run the risk of pointing out the way in which QUEJIDO—thinking of painting—has himself envisaged this zone of expansion or dilatation of painting, when this di-latation becomes in his hands both dis-latation and de-latation, meaning when painting not only dilates, broadening its expressive side, but also dislates, producing schizoid nonsense that shatters it and leads it toward the inexpressible, while at the same time it delates—a particular modus operandi of QUEJIDO’s—when it leaves its side and the painted is now only the can ( lata ) of paint itself, its explicit container, and where the painting is painted by painting itself on the exterior of that can of paint. An operation full of significance, it nevertheless permits an allusion to the ironic source of the act of painting—in fact inexpressible—and a proposal for a finish that threatens to cover it all in a single gesture of appropriation and exhibition, also inexpressible in its turn. Dis- and de-lated painting simultaneously shows all the expressible and the insuperable limit of the inexpressible.

We can bet that the series of La pintura (Painting) concerns (or unconcerns) itself with exactly the same paradox as the Anstrich series: that of letting something inexpressible be seen precisely in the way it continues to be strictly unexpressed and inexpressible.

The Web of Painting

Behind the hand, behind that instrument trained for better or worse to follow the orders of the painter’s soul, there would then be another hand, at first sight invisible, but destined above all to be what anyone sees, and ultimately to be all that is seen. Occupying all that is visible, it is preoccupied with being a tireless organ of expression and ceases to occupy itself when it is forced to confront the endless task of attaining the inexpressible. This hyperbolic “painter’s hand” is what we generally call—never pejoratively—the painter’s maniera . With it, there comes onto the canvas something that appears by disappearing and disappears by appearing: PAINTING.

Having reached this point, it is the moment to enter QUEJIDO, provided that we understand that in his pictures, QUEJIDO—as we saw in the “V-Q connection”—is rather the one who comes out, the one he turns out (to be) after painting has entered him like a demonic possession. Lightly armed with a brush, he advances with the unrelinquishable outline of a doubt or a question and the intention of embarking on an adventure that will have no spectators (it will happen off camera), always surrounded by an intriguing calm (before? after? inside? outside?), distributing planes of color wisely administered (and where so many things are read!). And from there he returns, abandoning the picture he leaves behind, more deprived, more absent, poorer and more dispossessed than when he entered, perhaps without the slightest recollection of what happened in there, but preserving the prodigious memory he transmits that something decisive happened there for what has come out to be precisely what is called PAINTING. He is thus laden with it, and so laden with what is loaded onto him by being, and among other things by being a painter, for now, after that decisive transit where painting has cast off the painter, he has been transmuted solely into “the hand of painting.”

QUEJIDO, fully aware of what is being woven in this entering and exiting or remaining inside and outside, appears to have resorted to various formulae in order to represent it. Among them, the first, the simplest, and the most effective has been to include in his pictures the schematic figure of a man or woman passing between the planes, or even penetrating them, remaining half inside and half outside them. Their passage hardly allows a distance to be established that will distinguish them, while there would be no chance without it for any depth to open up, and neither, of course, would there be any space for the limited movement of the figure within the distance represented. And then, after so many games with the plane, QUEJIDO has unexpectedly found himself obliged to introduce a hand (!) into these scenes endowed with such a parsimonious “absence of distance.” Let us see it as it insistently appears in the series Los pintores (The Painters) (p. 99).

It is not just any hand, but the relief of a hand impregnated with paint that seems to be both the remnant of an exterior contact left as a trace and a sticky hand protruding outward, its palm turned toward the viewer, with the intention of resting on the invisible distance—or on the non-distance—separating the interior of the picture from its always invisible outer membrane. A trace suggesting the painter’s signature? A sign of his power or authority? This is not credible. Here we seem to be confronted by a purely pictorial decision taken within the field of what it would mean to “think in paint,” and whose object is to answer the question of who is able to think in paint, and who the subject of such thought would be, in order to give the same constant reply: the hand of the painter (which is the hand of painting itself).

That hand is there to allow us to dream. In the first place, it perhaps lets us dream of the initial steps taken by painting when the walls of caves played host to positive or negative handprints among their first guests, marks that refuse to tell us what their function or purpose was. Since that remote time, in any case, the hand has always been involved in one way or another, and whenever a painter has painted a hand, he has always made it into a signifier endowed with the absolute power to mean something. In any picture of QUEJIDO’s series Los pintores, that hand is to be found inside a subtle “sleight of hand.” There, anyone can recognize scenarios previously created by QUEJIDO—“PAINTING,” “THE CAN OF PAINT,” or “ANSTRICH”—and that set of planes through which a kind of phantom figure passes and interferes with them, perhaps the personification of the mysterious “UMZUG”: the movement of removal that visits so many pictures of his recent years, and which is perhaps the incarnation in its turn of the gesture of resistance that his painting has finally become.

We are without doubt permitted to examine the way each figure uses its hands:

The hands of the painters (man and woman) of walls and partitions, which hold a house painter’s brush that is always in contact with the plane/wall they have made palpable, and behind which, when their job is done, they will make themselves disappear.

— The hand of who is painting (where what is painted is the painting), which this time holds the artist’s paintbrush and carefully delineates the painted scene, and at whose contact everything seems to have been suspended at the instant it was produced. This time, the hand is that of the appearance of what we can unequivocally say is the occurrence of painting inside the picture.

— In the third place, however, we have the hand of the schematic figure, the inhabitant of the “umzug” (the “removal”) which has continued to occupy QUEJIDO to this day, a kind of alien foreign to this world. A larger figure than the rest, it places its foot in this version— itself flat—in front of all the planes, appearing even to want to leave the painted surface composed of straight lines that frame it on a flat but not necessarily still surface, where it is quite easily possible to distinguish, like a chain of polygons, head, arms, trunk, legs, and feet (to indicate the direction of travel, when there is one), but in its first appearances, no hands. And yet here, in this evolved figuration, we now have an imposed and superimposed hand (or two in some versions) that is completely different in every way to any other component of the other figures. Unlike the others, this hand has relief, projection, and weight. It is prominent, but is joined to the painted surface in such a particular way that it might serve purposely as a signal of the presence of the outside of the painting in the picture.

A triple presence—interlocked—of PAINT in the picture (of QUEJIDO):

Presence of paint given by the open possibility that the whole thing will disappear inside the picture, submerged completely behind a single plane of color. Presence of paint as the real menace of submerging everything in its flattening presence: series of La lata de la pintura (The Can of Paint).

— Explicit presence of paint when represented on the canvas is the “act” of painting itself understood as an inside created to hold the gesture of the hand that holds and guides the brush, through which painting is painted, thus affirming itself in its own presence: series of La pintura.

— Living presence of paint through the ostension of an open hand bathed in paint, which is not only shown to the viewer but suggests its provenance through the superimposition on the canvas of a separate living hand, which has left its exact trace there. The trace of its intuited presence: series of Los pintores.

No Distance: No Measure

Painting turns the painter into a hand through which it paints itself. In its painting (itself), the painter—the hand of the painter—has had to erase himself, ceasing to be the one who paints. He paints the paint painting itself and thereby, in its presence, he unpaints himself, losing himself at that instant in the imperceptible distance between the painted paint and the painting paint. The painting of the paint is meanwhile opened up to its own happening as painting, winning itself a place that will allow it to be—and to be only painting, painting that paints and paints itself (on its own). During this transit, there will even be a happy moment when the paint, still fresh, indeed paints itself, meaning that it declares itself painted and at the same time says “wet paint.” From then on, the paint fixes itself in painting, dries, and is retained on the painted surface. Now converted completely into the “painter’s hand,” it becomes a painting presence—in another way. With so many twists and turns, has the painting at last finished its adventure? In this exercise that might complete the action of setting his hands to work, the painter (that is, the hand of painting) finds his labor interrupted and allows himself to be invaded by a purposelessness (a de-working or un-working) that prevents him from continuing the work, leaving it in suspense and confiscating its action from him. At that moment, he remains seated with his hands clasped.

With hands clasped, the painter prepares to P I E N T S AR, painting/ thinking not the signifying distance, as he has done up to now, but the insignificance of painting. The pitcher has gone so often to the fountain of signification, pushing its luck, that it must finally come up against the insignificance into which the whole journey inevitably sinks: the insignificance of painting, or the immersion in the lack of distance that finally draws the paint into becoming painting. For we have seen that this whole journey from paint to painting has been filling with significance, but that this same occurrence has not been exhausted in the significance it has acquired. There remains the most difficult “step,” which, once taken, would leave it fully in the insignificance of the “un-working” it sought without realizing it. In order to find itself? No, always in order to lose itself, to lose its purposelessness in a never-ending endlessness.

And here we shall find a second devilish technique, one we referred to earlier as a new formula that resolves the problem of what is plotted in painting with an entrance and exit whose performer remains indistinctly both inside and outside. In this respect, we cannot help being amazed by QUEJIDO’s extraordinary Moebius Q-vista, with which we, without knowing how, would like to finish.

In a single stroke, the Moebius Q-vista is an answer to (at least) three problems that QUEJIDO’s painting has raised:

— that of the single surface recovered and rethought (painting that is all surface without depth or with a minimum diminishing volume);

— that of the beginning (that is a happening that never stops happening) and the finish (endlessness that ends what never reaches its end);

— that of the inside and the outside (which is the obverse and reverse and the top and bottom that become mingled and indistinguishable).

All this is resolved by penetrating the Moebius dimension, where there is a forward movement that retrieves the behind at every step (or a backward movement forward and vice versa: an endless pursuit of distanceless distance); in other words, an advance with no front and no back, which is what the singular Moebius dimension, retrieved in the “Moebius cube” or Moebius Q-vista, consists of.

On the one hand, the replacement of the strip by the cube has given an architectural gravity to what, when it was just a “strip,” floated in a vacuum with no ground or sky, destined in its in-between state to be simply the torsion of its own surface. By contrast, the “cube” of eleven

(or more) sides—which nevertheless have and do not have “another side”—forms a single surface that always maintains an invisible base on which the entire construct rests, providing a support for what was in principle unsupportable.

The extraordinary invention of this “Moebius cube” or Moebius Q-vista has perhaps not been given its due value. Without claiming to exhaust it, we note that at first sight it is a volume, an architectural space that even allows us to imagine a strange dwelling with its rooms in separate (very airy) spaces. In this volume, however, we know that when we apply a geometric gaze, both the floor and the walls form a single endless surface. Its walls could even be painted to produce the illusion that there is something like a front and a back, where in each case the other side of the floor or wall is of a different color. As we drag ourselves over the continuum of its surface, however, what will happen, without our knowing how, is that we unexpectedly find ourselves continuing our progress uninterruptedly over the surface in the other color.

Within the geometric space of the Moebius Q-vista, it is possible to move—and in fact one must—because the Moebius condition is only achieved by displacement. When still, unilaterality cannot in any way be perceived as a characteristic property of the Moebius object. In moving over its surface, the figure adhering to it walks, climbs, descends, slips, clings so as not to fall—out? Yes, of course, but moving over an outside that lacks an inside, forced not to remain, not to stand still, not to stop, not to arrive at the finishing line: not to finish (having always already finished, like the hypothesis of the Eternal Return).

Everything around is perhaps a bottomless abyss, but forward or backward, in the infinite that awaits or precedes the figure, its steps into the infinite will have lost their previous or subsequent state forever. Always stuck to a surface it never abandons, the figure tirelessly ascertains that this surface is inexhaustible, never reaching a limit that allows it to say it has reached the end. It is all, then, nothing but geometry, the only thing that can provide us with the idea of an even more vertiginous infinity than the bottomless abyss over which its movement is traced. The only thing? Is there anything that resembles this? Yes, because for the brush (or the palette knife etc.) that penetrates the space of the painting, we know too that the front and the back, the inside and the outside are also undone. For the happening of painting, as for the Moebius Q-vista, there is no longer an entrance and an exit. There is no beginning or end for a task that was never able to start nor can ever finish.

Now we are near the end. What is the figure in (in?) the Moebius Q-vista doing confronting the prospect of the interminable? What the figures painted by QUEJIDO always do in their strange stillness: becoming a figure of thought. So that QUEJIDO can, in the end, P I E N T S AR; that is, the endless. This is stated by the very picture that dictates the fin, the end: “AL PINTAR PONERLE FIN, LA PINTURA TIENE UN FINAL SIN FIN” (PUT AN END TO PAINTING, PAINTING HAS AN ENDLESS ENDING). Let us say it now with an imperative formula: “Let there be no end where the end reigns,” which means that where painting has put an end, it has even painted the end that it has thought itself. In its own gesture—which seemed to say “stop painting”—it has continued to paint and to invite to paint, knowing that installed there is the endlessness it tried itself to erase.

That is why we have approached the picture that says FIN (p. 208). We see it and do not see it, we read it and do not read it. However, to think it better, we take a mirror with us, we look through it and we are astonished.

There we have it: “sit” (let [it] be / [it] is]. And we cannot help but RE-IR (laugh/re-go).