LA PINTURA

“Painting,” says Quejido, “is always waiting for me. Painting is what waits the most; that is why we always return to it.”

Throughout the twentieth century, we witnessed a curious rosary of deaths and resurrections of painting, as if proclaiming the death of painting were a necessary condition for painting to stay alive. But like Don Juan, painting — that great seductress — can say: “The dead you buried, Commander, are in excellent health.” The latest of these rebirths took place in the transition from the seventies to the eighties. After the assaults of Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Body Art, happenings… after all those sermons about the dematerialization of art, painting once again occupied center stage, inscribed itself anew in the present moment, even became fashionable for a few seasons — not many — and perhaps for the last time.

“I think,” says Quejido, “that painting tore its skin into strips, stripped itself bare to reveal its entrails, its emptiness, and practically disappeared, becoming unworkable, devoured by its own creatures — those new plastic modalities that it revealed as it tore itself apart and that we call the avant-gardes. Let those new creatures continue along their path of possibilities, painting said to itself in its final instant, and then added: with my own hands, I want to rebuild myself.”

Zeitgeist, A New Spirit of Painting, New York/New Wave, 1980, pintura-pintura, Transavanguardia, New Wild Ones, schizos, post-post… the exhibitions and labels that, during those years, certified the phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic, paradoxically did not announce a new painting; they did not proclaim the advent of a new style, a new school, or a new “ism.” Their proposal was far more astute: to break once and for all with the deterministic chain to which the Modern Movement had condemned us, and to do so in favor of a new approach to the problem, a new spirit toward painting and the arts in general. A new spirit of confrontation that would replace the old and exhausted opposition between tradition and the avant-garde, between the classical and the modern, between the old and the new, between the abstract and the figurative, between the past and what is yet to come. The eighties were the last great battle for painting, and it ended — everything must be said — in an apparent defeat and a concealed victory. This is precisely what we shall attempt to demonstrate, and this splendid exhibition, presented by the Galería Miguel Marcos in its spaces in Barcelona and Zaragoza, with which Quejido inaugurates the new millennium dedicated to “painting,” suits our purpose perfectly.

“A certain concept of modernity,” Quejido said, “both in abstraction and in so-called figuration, bore its last fruits in the seventies. Today, already in the eighties — though for some the foundations had begun years earlier — there emerges a painting that, through its plausibility, will slowly take root in the long European tradition, that of the ancients and the moderns, to which we undoubtedly still belong.”

More than a new painting, what was being announced was a painting free of complexes, and if such a painting is possible today, it is thanks to that foretold defeat.

“A life, a painting without excuses,” says Quejido, “that asks no permission, painting in your face, unafraid of contamination and finding its vitality in crossings, contagions, affinities that shape its becoming. A painting more than awake, which in its passions truly laughs at the lie that every identity is.”

With painting, the same happens as with history. People speak of the death of painting just as they speak of the end of history, with the shamelessness of those who do not hesitate to resort to rhetorical formulas in order to be heard. In these times, art criticism, no less than philosophy or any other discipline of thought, needs forceful and sparkling slogans to carve out a space for itself in the devalued supermarket of ideas, that everything-for-a-dollar paradise where the items not on special offer are sold at discount prices.

Little does it matter. In the end, things always happen differently. The walls and curtains of politics collapse when least expected, and painters build their partitions and screens when and where no one had foreseen. Neither painting dies nor history comes to an end; what becomes exhausted are merely the more or less interested, more or less pertinent or legitimizing narratives that were woven around them — the epic tale of class struggle in the case of history, the domestic epic of the struggle for the new in the case of painting.

“Painting,” says Quejido, “is like a trap. I have the feeling that it has no end, that it is infinite, that it can never be finished and has scarcely even begun. To paint is to place oneself in a state of endless incompletion.”

One of these cyclical gravediggers of painting, Douglas Crimp, to cite one example — author of widely circulated pamphlets in their day such as On the Museum’s Ruins and The End of Painting — in an essay on the conceptual artist Daniel Buren dated 1981, recalled how a century and a half earlier the painter Paul Delaroche — one of those history painters abhorred by the Symbolists — overwhelmed by the impact that the invention of the daguerreotype was going to have on the visual arts, threw down his brushes while pronouncing the sentence: “Today painting has died.” This happened more or less at the very moment when the painter Manet — the first modernist painter — was accused by many recalcitrant contemporaries, as the critic Clement Greenberg recalled, of being the last painter. Curiously enough, this same opinion would later be shared by the philosopher of history Oswald Spengler when attempting to situate the crisis of the fine arts within the context of The Decline of the West. From Malevich to Reinhardt, the myth of the “last painting” became one of the commonplaces of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

For Crimp, for example, Buren’s “stripes” amounted to something like the wrappings of the shroud of the mummy of painting, that far from venerable old woman whom he was finally preparing to bury: “Buren knows very well that when his stripes are seen as painting, painting will be understood as sheer foolishness. When his work becomes visible, the code of painting will have been abolished and Buren’s essays may come to an end: the end of painting will have been recognized.” The problem was that even a gravedigger as determined as he was had no choice but to acknowledge that the matter was not so simple: “although the execution order (of painting) has been periodically issued throughout the era of modernism, no one seems to have wished to carry it out; life awaiting death drags on into old age.”

To his dismay, in 1981 painting showed signs of vigor and freshness unlike anything even the oldest hands in the field could remember; painters once again appeared combative and exuberant for the first time in a long while. As for good old Buren, he has continued insisting on his little stripes until establishing himself as one of the most tiresome and single-minded artists on the international scene (a stroll through the Seville fairgrounds would surely be an excellent remedy for obsessive neurosis).

Far more interesting to me in this regard are the theses of Arthur C. Danto, a philosopher turned art critic, author of a recent and controversial essay on the subject entitled After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. What we have been witnessing since the sixties, he argues, is not the end of art or the death of painting, but rather the collapse through exhaustion of the legitimizing and linear narratives of modernity. “In the post-historical phase,” Danto asserts, “there are countless paths for artistic production, none more privileged than the others, at least historically. And part of what that meant was that painting, no longer the principal vehicle of historical development, was now one possible medium within the diversity of media and practices defining the art world, which included installations, performances, videos, computers, and mixed-media combinations, not to mention earthworks or body painting, and much art that had previously been stigmatized as craft.”

By the end of the eighties and throughout the nineties, painting once again lost — I would not say ground, but certainly prominence. At the beginning of the new millennium, painting was no longer at the center of the debate. It was not that it had once again been expelled and cast into the outskirts. In some way, it continued to preserve many of the positions and much of the prestige it had reconquered at the beginning of the eighties. I would even say that, for the first time in a long while, painting had found its place, the place that suited it best; it had settled where it could breathe most freely, at a point equidistant from both the pressure of the center and the coldness of the periphery. And everything suggests that it settled in that place not provisionally, but for a long time to come.

Something Danto himself acknowledges when he states that the rest of the new artistic practices are still in a process of “refinement” and that they “still lack the potential for progressive development found in painting over the centuries: in its first phase, the project of achieving ever more precise representations of the world, and in its modernist phase, developments of its pure state ever more adequate to itself.”

Conclusions similar to those reached by Quejido himself through the path of practice, which in his case has always been inseparable from reflection. And he has done so by incorporating into painting resources and possibilities drawn from other media and languages, striving to broaden its field of action toward supports and surfaces beyond the limited domain of easel painting.

“Every support,” says Quejido, “is unbearable.” The image is indifferent to the support, and for painting the support is the first thing posited as painting. Painting is the support that supports itself. Painting supports nothing other than itself. Painting: the bearable within the unbearable.

One could establish a curious parallel between the “threats” painting suffered in the mid-nineteenth century and those it would once again face in the sixties of the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century critics who predicted the end of painting at the hands of the newly invented photograph failed to perceive the importance that another “less spectacular” but no less crucial invention would have for the expansion of painting: the commercialization of oil paints in tubes during the 1840s. The kitchen of painting became notably simplified, facilitating access to the medium for many artists for whom the difficulty of producing “their” own colors had been an insurmountable obstacle.

Until 1969, the year Sony launched its portable video camera onto the market and made video accessible to all budgets, no invention had effects comparable in the field of art. Since then, video artists have become the principal competitors of painters, and without a doubt they have been winning the media battle against them, if not the commercial one. Even so, they will hardly succeed in killing — or even displacing — “the radio star.”

Photography in its time, and a century later video and all technological advances, far from killing painting, have paradoxically helped it move forward. In the nineteenth century by liberating it from its mimetic condition. In the second half of the twentieth century by liberating it from its retinal condition.

“One,” says Quejido, “who was already several, took those years calmly, occupied himself painting, showing how painting was reopening its eyes. That this event of the return of PAINTING involved not so much subjectivities expressing themselves, as accompanying the historical course of PAINTING in this reopening of the eyes — her eyes, PAINTING’s eyes — she who had already been considered dead. With a shameless gesture, she confirmed to us that she had never been Snow White.”

Painting, indeed, was never Snow White, among other things because it is, and has always been, THE GODMOTHER of all the visual arts, the terrible, magnificent, and wicked godmother condemned, more than to looking at herself, to examining herself over and over before the mirror, anxiously asking whether she is still the fairest in the kingdom. Until one day the mirror answered: “There is another more handsome, cleverer, and more amusing than you. His name is Marcel Duchamp.”

Quejido belongs to that generation of painters who sharpened their first weapons in the sixties, were battle-tested during the seventies, triumphed in the eighties and now enjoy what used to be known as a splendid maturity. A cohort hardly likely to be repeated, to which belong — give or take ten or fifteen years — painters such as Polke, Richter, Baselitz, Immendorf, Kippenberger, the Oehlen brothers, Clemente, Salvo, Dokoupil, Kirkeby, Auerbach, Baechler, Salle, Schnabel, the late Basquiat… and, among us, Campano, García Sevilla, Barceló, Broto, Carlos Franco, Chema Cobo, the late Alcolea and Claramunt… to mention just a few names at random.

The historical role, so to speak, that fell upon the shoulders of this generation was precisely to take up the baton of the avant-garde from the hands of Marcel Duchamp and to do so without abdicating painting. This was, in short, the great “masterstroke” of these painters, many of whom had been raised suckling at the conceptual teat. I am not exaggerating when I say that these painters managed to wring Duchamp’s neck in the same way that the first avant-gardists wrung the neck of the modernist swan.

This successful strategic maneuver does not mean that the approaches and intentions of all the painters involved were the same. Quite the contrary. In the case of most of the German painters mentioned, raised in the wake of Joseph Beuys, the return to painting took place from openly cynical positions: for them it was a matter of continuing to fight against painting without abandoning it, without getting off the donkey — I mean, the easel. “The contradiction,” wrote Richter, “consists in knowing that with the tools you work with you cannot achieve what you seek, although at the same time you are unwilling to replace them with others.”

“Richter,” Professor María Bolaños has written, “feels like a fugitive from tradition, like the son of a rupture and a historical explosion, but also as the debtor of a great historical knowledge accumulated over the centuries and impossible to repeat. We have forgotten a certain way of painting; we have lost the sense of execution, the compositional faculty. And this loss is due not only to technological progress, to the competition of photography, to Auschwitz, to the disappearance of bourgeois culture. There is a more decisive reason, consubstantial with contemporary malaise, which is — once again the same old refrain — the absence of a center, the imposture of every Unity, irrecoverable for the experience of our century.”

With the tools of painting, the German artist has been carrying out a sort of remake of every style imaginable, a cold, tragic, anti-didactic retrospective of modern art in which there is too much good painting, too intense a commerce with painting itself, and sufficient painterly wisdom for one to believe that it is merely a work of parodic intention. Is it instead, as Professor Bolaños maintains, the remnants of aesthetic idealism sustained by an underlying belief in painting as the only possible form of hope? Most likely, yes.

Quejido’s path is diametrically opposed to Richter’s, and in some way complementary. Quejido is not a painter against painting, but a painter in favor of it. Although both begin from an awareness of the contemporary disaster, painting, in his case, is not the consequence of a rupture or a trauma; it is born from fascination. It is not the daughter of bad conscience, what remains from a process of fragmentation or dissolution of identity, whether individual or collective, but rather the product of a joyful adhesion — no less critical for being joyful — of an ambition toward totality.

“There are no new truths,” Henri Matisse wrote in 1908. “The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, is based on choosing ordinary truths that have often been repeated to him, but which will acquire a novelty before him and which he will make his own on the day he has sensed their profound feeling.”

Because of the breadth of his interests, the variety of resources he sets in motion, the diversity of paths he has opened and inventions he has patented, I consider Quejido the true archetype of the contemporary painter, of what today can only be called a total painter. A forerunner on his way to becoming a classic.

A painter who, between 1964, the date of his first exhibition, and 1974, the year of his first major retrospective —

held, fittingly enough, at the M-11 Art Center / Velázquez Birthplace in Seville —

can be said not to have painted a single picture. He was rooting around instead, with a curiosity matched only by his absolute lack of prejudice, through every meander and nook of the avant-gardes of the moment: from visual poetry to computer art, from psychedelic mandalas to neo-pop recyclings, from automatic deliriums to comic strips.

That first retrospective closed with a triptych of cardboard pieces dated 1974: Matilde Conceals a Thought. It could be interpreted as a joke; in fact, all of Quejido’s work is grafted with muffled laughter and splinters of humor, with strangled words and disjointed meanings. Like much of the work on paper from those prophetic years — especially the first series of painted cardboard pieces that would eventually form the monumental Taco (several hundred cardboard sheets measuring 1 meter by 70 centimeters) — they were technically painted rough and raw, with a spirit very close to what at the time came to be called “bad painting.”

It took us some time to understand that the “thought” Matilde concealed was the same “thought” typed out by Regina, the old and faithful Underwood typewriter, paradigm of all the machines that are and have been in the world: the thought of painting. For Quejido, painting and thinking are intimately intertwined actions; forms and images are, at bottom, nothing but formulas, and painting, one might say, a flower of thought.

“For me,” says Quejido, “above and below everything that can be said, there is topology, places, sites, indifferences. What do I mean? That ‘Painting’ manifests itself, happens through painters and sometimes, as in these cases and others like them, as nodal points of its limits. Points among the multitude of painter-points that weave its body, ‘painting.’”

From that original thought emerged the series of thoughts dedicated to painters, but before that Quejido had already begun summoning and settling accounts with his own ghosts: the ghosts of Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Diego Velázquez… and through these reckonings the first great paintings gradually took shape — Maquinando, Correrías, El Parto, Las Puertas… — while the first slogans were formulated: “this is where it passes.” And then, in the eighties, the Decade of Painting, came the great series: the bathers, the naiads, the partitions, the chess games, the checkers games, the reflections, the homages to Mallorca… a process articulated over time according to an inexorable and devilish logic, open in a thousand directions, prone to zigzagging movements, unforeseen exits, wanderings, and surprises. And all of it woven through an Esquema in which Quejido incorporates both his works and his reflections, and which is on its way to becoming a “work of works,” a work in progress that might well be the envy of the most conceptual of conceptual artists.

The nineties, the Decade of Resistance, were once again years marked by experimentation: if painting is a flower of thought, it is also a nuisance — the Nuisance of Painting. A period in which, as in the sixties, the Decade of Difficulty, the artist’s studio was transformed above all into a laboratory, something Picasso had already recommended in his day: “A painter’s studio must be a laboratory. No one is imitated: one invents. Painting is a game of the spirit.” It is for this reason, no doubt, that painting, as Quejido concluded, paints itself: the Black paints it. And paints it with impeccable technique, needless to say.

“The nineties,” said Quejido, “are about resisting. A rainbow lightning flash, acrid, acrylic over EL PAÍS. And it will have to turn, I say, incandescent red, after the blinking of vivid and warm colors that will occur as it fades. RESISTANCE, a RE-GOING, a STOPPING WITHOUT STOPPING, OF KILLING THE TIME THAT KILLS US — and how? By painting.”

At this stage of the game, given the degree of complexity and development of the Esquema, it becomes evident that the evolution of Quejido’s work is governed by a kind of pendular movement: an experimental period is followed by a more painterly one. Alternating periods of action and reaction, insistence and resistance. Insistence on painting and resistance through invention.

A personal evolution that is nonetheless inseparable from that of its own time; on the contrary, it is its faithful counterpart: communicating vessels that never cease to function. In time, it will become clear that Quejido’s work is among those that best define the age.

The high point of the nineties was undoubtedly the major retrospective I curated for the IVAM in Valencia in 1997: 33 Years of Resistance, a sumptuous display of the most experimental, radical, and political Quejido. Unforgettable were the grand mural paintings he created then on the walls of the Carmen church: Velázquez-inspired allegories of the army, banking, and the monarchy. Hardly had it closed, as one might expect according to this pendular logic, when Quejido took up once again — with more vigor than ever — the never-abandoned thread of painting.

“The Japanese poet of the second half of the seventeenth century, Matsuo Bashō,” Quejido reminds us, “begins his work The Narrow Road to Oku by saying: for the one who rides within the journey, everything is journey. When I read this thought, I read work instead of journey, without what Bashō meant by journey changing for me once I noticed the mistake. For the one occupied in work, everything is work.”

During 1998 and 1999, Quejido painted new versions of The Bathers, El Parto, Maquinando, The Stations of the Lake, The Doors, The Checkers Games, The Naiads… the very same motifs and themes that had occupied him twenty years earlier, that had driven him to “become-born a painter.” It was by no means a regression, but rather — to use a verb of his own invention — a re-going, a slipping through that Cubist Möbius strip whose secrets and workings he had been investigating in parallel. Milestones within a continuous movement, without beginning or end, pauses along the road of a journey whose ending we do not know, because we have forgotten how and when it began.

In these new versions of his old, ever-recurring themes, it becomes evident just how much Quejido has grown as a painter, what heights of mastery and technical skill he has attained. Above all, they reveal how the ever-renewed lesson of his tutelary ghosts perfectly matches the repertoire of solutions and procedures acquired through his experimental investigations.

Thus we arrive at the broad series of paintings — some twenty large-format canvases and around sixty smaller works — with which he has occupied much of this year, now exhibited by that old companion in the journey of painting and painters, Miguel Marcos. It is titled simply and plainly PAINTING, and in it we rediscover Quejido the painter in his purest, quintessential state.

“Matisse is the reference,” says Quejido, “but in saying Matisse we also say Picasso, and how could one forget Cézanne and the whole genealogy that passes through Manet… When painting looks at itself, that is what it draws upon…”

These works are, apparently, variations on one of painting’s classical themes: the painter and the model — a subject which, for Quejido no less than for Pablo Picasso, as Michel Leiris wrote, came to be “the foundation of far more than an ordinary ‘series’; it attained the generality of a pictorial genre of infinitely renewable content: the genre of ‘painter and model,’ in the same sense that one speaks of the genre of ‘still life’ or ‘landscape.’” Yet a closer observation reveals that this is not the typical scene of a painter depicting, at the easel, a static and submissive model upon the canvas. What Quejido offers us is an allegory of painting painting itself, without intermediaries, without distance, without any other device than a small bowl and the skeleton of a brush. A continuous, circular composition folding back upon itself. The very same subject he formally approached in the series I Love Mallorca and conceptually in the series The Painter and Painting, now carried to its ultimate consequences.

“If one thinks,” says Quejido, “that these are merely color variants, one fails to realize that what truly differentiates them is not there, but in how, in each painting, all the elements that compose it are woven together, so that Painting becomes the image of itself, so that Painting paints itself.”

Two female figures in action — painting painting and painting painted — feeding back into each other within a space that, while being the same, is always different. Repetition and difference. Synthetic versions and luscious versions, almost monochrome versions and fiercely chromatic versions. All of them charged with a mysterious sensuality, as if by some sleight of hand the pictorial space had been transmuted into a mystic space where a strange carnal exchange takes place.

“There is a totally sexualized space,” says Quejido, “which is not the same at any point, a space that records, like a map, an event. What matters is not so much the image as the event, the act of painting itself, putting one’s eyes on what is happening on the surface… fully immersed in that disaster that is there… even correcting it… following it in some way. The disaster as that which delivers the difference between idea and fact, what we see without seeing it, the heterogeneous and irreducible to intentionality and predictability, the underlying that is ruin and possibility of all presence.

To put one’s eyes inside the painting, to touch painting, to caress it with the gaze. The haptic eye alongside optical vision. To revel. To lick one’s lips. To paint. To retouch. To laugh. To think. To resist. To scheme. To insist. The painter’s resistance. Painting’s insistence. Today as yesterday, just as tomorrow, just as always, here, with all of you, unique, seductive: Painting!”

QUICO RIVAS

Peña del Oso, I-2002.