Manolo Quejido, Exhibition, Palacio de Velázquez del Parque del Retiro, Madrid: 21 October 2022-16 May 2023

After beginning with an exploration of expressionism, pop and geometric experimentation, Quejido finally began to paint in 1974.

As he moved into the eighties, he began to produce a radiant painting, based on the pretext of everyday life but attentive to the whole tradition of Western painting, which had been passed through Quejido's particular hand. From these paintings, throughout the decade Quejido studied, in different series, the spatiality of pictorial representation and the peculiar distances that have a place there, on the single plane of the canvas.

Since 1993, Quejido has also been working in response to what he calls a state of "generalised mediation". Faced with the overwhelming empire of the consumption of objects and images that characterises the last decades of the twentieth century, the artist uses enlarged views of product labels and supermarket offers, newsprint and press photographs, articulating his repulsion. A repulsion that also has a bearing on the safe distance that the media places between us and the present.

The exhibition also includes his continuous reflections on thought and painting, which have occupied him from 1974 to the present day: painting is not limited to representing a thought, but produces it in its own making. In this process, according to Quejido's way of doing, painting/thinking is always accompanied by a third term, that of feeling.

As a whole, the nearly 100 works exhibited in Distance without Measure will not only allow the spectator to review Quejido's evolution, but also to become aware of the artist's radically critical character and the lucidity and rigour of his research into the plastic possibilities of painting.