SIN CONSUMAR, SIN NOMBRE, SIN SALIDA

WITHOUT QUEJIDO (Public reflection in which the existence of the object Quejido is called into question)

After assuming that, insofar as it is I who corresponds to be the subject, everything that is not me/subject is something else/object, one establishes a simple questioning turn that gives rise to a composition of place according to which the existence of an object is affirmed, denied, or doubted. I could be doubting the existence of this graphite pencil of mine with which I begin to publicly set out my doubts about the existence of the object Quejido. I very well could, of course, and even doubt my own existence. But a simple clarification has allowed me to strip away the doubts about the existence of the pencil (those that fall upon my own existence are another matter). Not so in the case of the object Quejido, whose existence, given its elusive game with my questions, has become the target of my doubt.

For whoever it may concern, I find it appropriate to enumerate and transcribe the phases of this public reflection in which the existence of the object Quejido is called into question.

FIRST: ON NATURE (OR THE CONSTITUTION OF AN OBJECT)

I came to the conclusion that this is my pencil because I saw it being born and because, moreover, after its birth, a series of events unfolded in order to establish order and constitute its biography. I, and therefore it is mine, bought in a specialised place, a stationery shop, a wooden pencil object, striped in black and yellow, with a long graphite lead and stamped at one end with the inscription GERMANY STAEDTLER NORIS 120 2HB. My pencil had been born. Its size at birth was 17.5 centimetres, of which I have consumed more than three quarters, so that soon the events will cease to accompany it. Its birth and its biography have given it a nature that fulfils the first requirement for its existence.

Well then, the object Quejido has also been born and things, events or avatars have been happening to it. It seems to have a specific nature. At least so is suggested by those autobiographical papers someone left on my desk, and by the paintings, poems, canvases, posters and writings that seem to illustrate that biography.

“I was born in Seville on 12.12.46 and the family moved to Madrid in 1960. I was 17 when my brother Enrique and I began to become acquainted in Madrid with the work of Spanish painters of the 1950s, which renewed our great curiosity for modern painting and brought us up to date with the latest things being done around 1964. (…) I was impressed by Saura’s work (…)

POP was becoming known and the news, though minimal, surprised me. I understood the “Dada taste” (…) Rauschenberg, J. Johns, and Arman, and especially Wesselmann (…) Previously, Tàpies’ objects had indicated to me, as had Millares, the direction of the flow in these approaches (…) Velázquez at the Prado presented itself to me as the strongest point proposed in painting. After him, the long chain led by Goya, the assault on reason (…) news arrived of the optimistic years of the Bauhaus (…) Marisol and I met, and after the first geometric works we began the work of the Sequences (…) This arose alongside my readings of what we call philosophy in general and science in particular; a great spiritual attraction arose in me from what I was discovering in Eastern culture, especially Zen (…) minimal mathematical knowledge and a sound logic, a logic that inscribed itself in the course of the work and that is the basic linguistic substrate of my practice (…) 1974 (…) Dürer, Surrealism and Velázquez-Tohaku, all points emanating from the Leonardesque smile. Pain, onirism and concealment (…) So far I have tried to “narrate” in an orderly way something that in itself does not submit to any discipline (…)”¹

Perhaps these words I underline with my graphite pencil are the only evidence that the object Quejido exists. But from them I cannot be certain that the object Quejido has an existence. You see, perhaps it exists only in the imagination of some meticulous playwright capable of constructing a truthful biography, giving it a place of origin, granting it an almost tangible nature, and being animal enough (in the best sense) to abandon it on a realistic stage so that it may act according to previously devised instructions. Perhaps the object Quejido is nothing more than a meticulously constructed and fitted character, and so I must continue to doubt.

SECOND: ON CONDITION (OR HOW TO RECOGNISE AN OBJECT BY ITS MANNERS)

I recall a fierce fable about the condition of objects. One day, when the forest was flooded by torrential rains, a scorpion begged a frog to carry him on her back and help him cross the river, whose current, due to the storm, threatened to rage and overflow. “But how am I supposed to carry you,” said the frog, “do you think I don’t know you will sting me?” To which the scorpion replied: “How could I sting you? We would both die and I would never reach the other shore.” “True,” she said, and trusting him, she carried the scorpion on her back. But halfway across the river, the frog felt the poisoned sting of the scorpion piercing her back. “Why did you do it?” she asked in shock. “Now we will both die.” To which the scorpion, shrugging his shoulders, replied: “It is my condition.”

Terrible. Well then, although less exemplary, my graphite pencil also has its condition: it always writes in black. If it wrote in red it would no longer be my graphite pencil but my red pencil. But doubt continues to accompany the object Quejido because how can one recognise it? Do not its works display the manners of hundreds of objects?

From an almost demonic possession of the expressionist spirit, we move to a corrosive critique of consumer society in the manner of POP. From the sobriety of flat, almost comic-book colours, to the drunken, Dionysian overflow of colours and forms of Matisse. And do we not wander across those canvases from abstraction anticipated by Cézanne to the methodical order of American-toned realism, from humbly perpetuated reality (Without name) to metaphor (The Birth)?

Some visual poems are his, some exercises in concrete poetry; as his as those cryptic-critical-ironic writings on painting. His, in short, is that gaze which drags itself across the body of Painting until it renders it transparent. His that ecstatic vision suspended behind the mirror which sees a menina explode and, with its fragments barely reassembled, recomposed, approaches the mirror to tousle its hair [“(…) for me Picasso and Matisse are the two eyes whose depth allows me to see, behind Matisse, Ingres and Titian, and behind Picasso, Goya and El Greco. In the mirror called Cézanne I wish to see Velázquez.”]²

If Nietzsche killed God, Foucault helped kill the author. Since then, although some graffiti on the walls claim that it is Nietzsche who has died and that God lives, there is no author—only what readers imagine as such. There is only one poet, said Borges, only one poet and hundreds of fragments, thousands of scattered fragments of that single poet.

No, the object Quejido does not always paint black. And yes, the signatory subject doubts.

THIRD. ON FUNCTION (OR ON THE ATTITUDES OF THE OBJECT)

My pencil only has a function when I take it between my fingers and point it at a sheet of paper, a piece of cardboard, a cigarette packet or whatever: to trace graphite lines, strokes that are intrinsically more or less coherent, recognisable, skilful or sensible. Of course, nothing prevents me from using it as an improvised ruler, as a boundary between chaos and order in the territory of my desk, or as stage prop in the mise-en-scène of a bacchanal of fountain pens. Nor will anyone deny that its function, which together with nature and condition defines its existence, is to draw black lines—or grey ones, if at this point someone feels like being pedantic.

What happens with the object Quejido? Does it have a single, specific function that confirms its existence and dispels this doubt from me? No.

When we are about to assert that we have detected painting as the necessary functionality for the object Quejido to crystallise, a foreign element appears in our retina and triggers doubt. For does the object Quejido paint in order to write, to construct and deconstruct itself, to think the electrical schemes of its thought, to order the randomness of concrete poetry, to bring together the compositional elements of visual poetry? Or does it write in order to paint and deconstruct thought into electrical constructions of a visual poetry that lays the foundations of a concrete poetry illuminated by its thought? Or does it think in order to write, to rhyme the connections of the electrical current of its painting and deconstruct concrete poetry while constructing visual poetry? Or perhaps it is one of those fragments rejected by the body of poetry that keeps turning and turning, like a forgotten satellite, unable to crash down and come to rest by the action and grace of the centripetal force of its thought, its writing, its painting?

It will not be me who dares to put curtains on the sky or doors on the field. I only dare—and it is no small thing—to keep doubting.