Art | February 24, 2023 |
Immeasurable Distance, Manolo Quejido
Retiro Pavilion, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
October 21, 2022 – May 16, 2023
Immeasurable Distance is an exhibition organized by Museo Reina Sofía, devoted to the work of Spanish artist Manolo Quejido (b. Seville, 1946), whose career started in 1964. Quejido began with experiments in Expressionism, Pop Art, and geometric experimentation, before turning definitely to painting in 1974.
In the threshold to the 1980s Quejido produced radiant paintings, taking as a pretext any minute incidents in quotidian life, while also looking at the entire tradition of Western painting – as particularly understood by Quejido’s hand. After these paintings, Quejido would study, during the 1980s, and across different series, the singularities in the spaces which are possible in any pictorial representation, as well as the peculiar distances that these spaces – in the surface of the canvas – can host.
From 1993 onwards Quejido’s art will also be a response to what he describes as “a state of general mediation”. Noting the overwhelming empire of consumption – both material and image consumption -, that characterizes the last decades of the XXth century, Quejido used enlarged views of commercial labels and sales announcements. He also used newspapers as the support for his paintings and press images as motifs, articulating the artists’ disgust and rejection. These works point to the “security distance” that the media place between us and the news.
Furthermore, the show includes Quejido’s continued reflections on painting and thinking – these are reflections that have endured since 1974. For Quejido, the action of painting does not simply represent a particular thought; indeed, thoughts are produced in the act of painting. In this process, according to Quejido, the pair to paint / to think also always go hand in hand with a third term: to sense (or to feel).
Overall, the nearly one hundred works displayed at Immeasurable Distance are the occasion to discover Quejido’s trajectory and to realize the artist’s radical and critical approach and the seriousness and hindsight of his investigations on painting’s plastic possibilities.
more. www.museoreinasofia.es