The container litany, or digressions about Manuel Quintana Martelo, city walker
I met Manuel Quintana, a painter from Santiago de Compostela, in the dawning days of Atlántica, the movement which set the clocks of painting in Galicia to international time. A movement which, despite having more than a few connections with the “Ochenta” of Madrid, was in more ways than one rooted in its immediate surroundings, and seemed to revive the 1920’s spirit of Galician neopopular modernism. It was that avant-garde generation that radically transformed the scene, and to which our painter pays tribute in the figure of Seoane who is the subject of one of his effigies. I think our first encounter took place at one of the editions of the memorable Pontevedra Biennial, though it might also have been in the context of the Atlántica exhibition that was held at the Palacio de Gelmírez in Santiago de Compostela in 1983.
After having lost contact for a couple of decades, it has been thanks to Miguel Fernández-Cid good work that I have met up again in recent years with Quintana Martelo, president (since 2014) of the Real Academia Galega de Belas Artes, which he was inducted into in 2004. And I’ve been able to see up close the extent to which this long-distance runner, man of action, yet also a thoughtful and meditative artist, has deepened his artistic universe and about which I have learnt much by reading the monumental monographic publication, in the manner of Cortazar’s Rayuela, which Miguel devoted to him, released in 2010 in A Coruña Government’s “Great Painters” Collection. And I have also come into contact with the painter, in the present decade, in his new guise as a Madrid walker, specifically inhabiting an area not far from my neighbourhood, though on the other side of the Manzanares: los Carabancheles, an area that over the last decade is enjoying a strong and highly publicized artistic growth, making it to an extent, albeit metaphorically, into Madrid’s Brooklyn, though the bridges leading there are less monumental than the one of the same name in New York. Paradoxically, for this painter the capital is a more neutral, calmer place than the province, and specifically Santiago de Compostela, where in the end he always has many things to be occupied with and to occupy him, among others the Academy, from where he is very proud to have succeeded in getting the Prado to exhibit Maestro Mateo. His studio in Carabanchel is therefore the perfect place for him. Where he can isolate and concentrate on his craft.
Taught from 1966 at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi in Barcelona, Quintana Martelo mentions from among his teachers a number of relatively forgotten artists who left no lasting mark on his education. Along with them, however, was another of much greater significance, who the writer of these lines managed to meet through the much-remembered Rafael Santos Torroella, and about whom many people have spoken, coinciding in describing him as the most “in touch” person of that milieu: the painter Jaume Muxart. Years later Muxart would go on to become the dean of that venerable institution, subsequently converted into a Faculty. It was with Muxart as his main guide that the painter-in-training entered the art jungle of his day, inside of which he was impressed early on by Francis Bacon a painter who at that time exerted a strong influence in our country and neighbouring countries. It was an academic education, in effect, which was fleshed out with mural studies in Sant Cugat del Vallès, and with the prestigious landscape grant in Granada. But in addition to this there immediately came more modern temptations. In this regard, Quintana Martelo is quite graphic in his recounting: if on starting at Superior Art School his foremost desire was to exhibit at the Sala Parés, the highly-reputed venue in Petritxol street near the Ramblas, by the time he graduated his goal was now the Ensanche, and specifically the Consell de Cent street. His aspirations would end up coming true, when he had a show, in 1979, at Adrià, an important gallery that has since disappeared, and one that was linked to the personal background of the writer of this text who spent seven years there as one of the Nine Painters from Seville brought there by Juana de Aizpuru.
Later came a period of travelling for Quintana Martelo, which was largely to visit museums. His first trip was to Paris, which implied his first visit to the Louvre, but it was also a first-hand awakening, in the emblematic year of 1968, to artistic modernity, mainly due to his exposure to the old Musée National d’Art Moderne, whose director was Jean Cassou. The second trip was to Amsterdam which led to his large cycle Crónica desde Rembrandt, shown in 1978 at an exhibition venue in Santiago de Compostela, at the aforesaid Adrià the following year and, subsequently, at three venues in Tarragona, his next place of residence. The biggest of the pieces in the cycle is remarkable, a two-metre high and seven-metre wide polyptych, whose energy and audacity bring to mind the artist’s fascination for Italian frescoes and for Mexican mural art. The northern canal city is also associated in its past to Van Gogh. The third formative trip was to London, that is to say, to Francis Bacon, at that time a fixture in Spanish art studies. Naturally all of this was shared with his ongoing devotion to the Prado Museum, further strengthened on each visit, and which would lead to his Visiones del Prado cycle, which features versions of paintings by Raphael, Durer, Titian, Rubens and Goya (including the latter’s Perro semihundido [The Half-Submerged Dog], which cast such a spell over our generation of abstract painters).
In those years, the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s (in 1981 he would return to Santiago, where he became a professor of drawing at the Instituto Arzobispo Gelmírez), in addition to his survey of tradition he explored many other disciplines: photographic works involving etching directly onto negatives, very much in the manner of Man Ray; series based on umbrellas, which echo Magritte’s, through their meticulous and systemic stylistic treatment owes more to Hernández Pijúan; a pop style cycle, based on the Stalin-Roosevelt Yalta Summit (1977); and his most conceptual show, Cercos-as (1979), at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Ibiza, with Manuel Allué, and subsequently repeated at the MAM in Tarragona in 1980.
Quintana Martelo would join Román Pereiro, a dynamic doctor and art collector, in the aforementioned Atlántica, established in 1980. There he mingled with artists he had been dealing with for years, such as Xabier Correa Corredoira, Ánxel Huete, Francisco Mantecón and Guillermo Monroy, and with others he had just met, such as Menchu Lamas, Antón Lamazares, Francisco Leiro and Antón Patiño. He coincided with all of them in 1983 at the group show mentioned earlier held at the Palacio de Gelmírez. Together with the rest he admired, as a kind of lighthouse illuminating the way, the veteran artist Laxeiro. In a drawing from 1984 he depicted the artist Leiro next to his astounding wood portrait of Lamazares. In that drawing, and the others he exhibited that year at the Galería Novecento in Vigo, one can detect strong similarities to Hockney the drawer. That the discipline of drawing was central to his thinking was demonstrated by the speech he gave on being inducted to the Academy in 2004 which was titled Form: the nature of drawing. A major event in his life, which may be related to his enthusiasm for painting during the Atlántica years, was his participation in founding Trinta, a gallery destined to become one of the best known of all Galicia, and which for a time had the faithful Allué as a collaborator. Even though neither of them are connected to the current Trinta, they are still very fond of it. It is certainly noteworthy that the gallery was the artists’ brainchild.
Quintana Martelo’s last formative trip was more than just a trip: a sojourn of several months, in 1992, in New York where he would return frequently, making it his other city. The confrontation with the sprawling metropolis is at the bottom of a cycle of paintings featuring Brooklyn Bridge (with the Twin Towers in the background), Lexington Avenue, Madison Avenue, Union Square, Mercer Street, Rose Street and Spring Street. Paintings in which urban elements (especially telephone cabins), walls and trash are the pretext for this masterful, painterly display… A number of American art critics wrote about his work in this period, among others Donald Kuspit. The painter has had four solo shows there, at the Artopia Gallery (1995), the Japan Airlines Art Gallery in Kennedy Airport (1996), the Wickiser Gallery (2003) and the QCC Art Gallery of the City University of New York (2006).
While Quintana Martelo is also attracted to words (he has illustrated, among others, Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, in his 2003 solo show in New York which was called Plastic Prose, and the 2011 one in A Coruña, at the Kiosco Alfonso, in which he lightly retouched his fellow countryman José Ángel Valente, Material/Memoria), he is generally a very much a painterly painter, who has depicted time and time again in his canvases and paperworks, from 1987 onwards (the year of his Achever de peindre cycle), his studio space, his thin and thick paintbrushes, rollers, dishes, trays, palettes, tubes and other materials of his trade. In fact, the colour-stained As zapatillas de pintar [Painting Shoes] (the title of one of his paintings from 2000), which remind me of a pair worn by Joan Mitchell on the day, now far back in time, when I met her during a lightning visit she made to Madrid for an exhibition project that never came to light. In his conversation mentioned earlier with Fernández-Cid, the painter from Santiago de Compostela lets slip a beautiful metaphor of the studio as a place of dreams. It is a space in which he depicts himself, in a major painting from 1997, some 195 centimetres tall and a few centimetres across too: Autorretrato no obradoiro. A feature, that of evoking painting’s battlefield (Antonio Saura dixit), he shares with some of his peers, and I am thinking of Alfonso Albacete and the suite that was part of his decisive solo show En el estudio [In the studio] (Galería Egam, Madrid, 1979), and in a number of paintings by Manolo Quejido (in La Nave), or others by Miguel Galano in his Madrid years, but mainly in all those self-portraits by Miquel Barceló. The matter of the studio, in addition, always boils down to being that of El cuadro dentro del cuadro [The painting within the painting], to put it using the title of one of Julián Gállego’s most famous books.
In contrast to the eminently rural and maritime tone that predominated Atlántica, in Quintana Martelo’s recent work the city is foremost, and it is this city-painter facet, which was foreshadowed in his New York oeuvre, that I find particularly fascinating, in the manner it is expressed in his prolonged Containers cycle. Begun in 2012 (a distant precedent being the drawing of a small container titled O tempo físico, from 1991), this cycle would keep him busy for the following five years, when in his own words he would develop “a geometric planimetry”. The painter’s own version of how this cycle came about is related to the flâneur, the city walker: “On the 14th of March 2012 at 14.36 walking from Gran Vía to Atocha street, I spotted a yellow rubbish container at number 23 of Marqués de Cubas, which was struck by the sun sideways from right to left: my favourite light which I employ in practically all of my work. I took a photograph and came back to the same container the following days, until one day it wasn’t there. The image stayed in my eyes and my mind for a while and I thought it would be a good subject for a painting: its visual impact, its almost perfect contents (which I correctly slightly when taking the photograph) and the splendid light”. He goes on later to recount the circumstances of that light. And explaining how, when it came to making the work it was based on, he was quite clear that the objects should be depicted life sized. And alluding to the varied mix of media: paper, photos, watercolours, oils… And his desire to put into practice a systematic dubiety and the art of variation, which he calls, in inverted commas, “to repeat and repeat”, adding “over and over again”, and hammering home: “the (almost obsessive) reiteration and repetition”.
As one can glean from the text I just quoted, in this and other cycles, and not unlike a few other painters, Quintana Martelo –who has posed for photographers as excellent as his compatriot Vari Caramés– reconciles his brushwork with his camerawork, which to him is like a pencil of a different kind. Internationally, think of Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and mostly of David Hockney who, as I mentioned earlier, is very much our painter’s cup of tea. Nationally, one has to mention some important artists of the 1950s and 1960s: Jesús de Perceval, Joaquín Rubio Camín, Fernando Zóbel, Alfredo Alcain, Luis Gordillo and Darío Villalba. As well as people who appeared afterwards, namely Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Juan Ugalde and José Manuel Ballester, though the latter has not completely set aside his paintbrushes, he spends most of his time today devoted to the art of the camera.
The obsessive city recording element which Quintana Martelo’s Containers is based on relates to Eugène Atget, the pioneer of modern photography and his vedute archive of París, as well as to Atget’s colleague and friend Berenice Abbott who not only contributed decisively to preserving her fellow photographer’s legacy but who also carried out a similar project in and around New York. Nearer to our times, we can mention Ruscha again, a painter who doubles up as photographer, who has skilfully set forth to show his absolutely unique and definitive vision of the non-city of Los Angeles (and curiously, in amongst Ruscha’s earliest photographs is one of a gutter in Madrid taken in 1961).
In various texts and in a few interviews too, Quintana Martelo has underlined the necessity of starting with the subject, which thus explains his fondness of cycles allowing him to practice his art of repetition and his variations on a theme.
The importance of drawing, the Hockney aspect, once again (always) for Quintana Martelo a man raised in the 1960s, had made him stand out in Atlántica, where he mixed with younger artists who received other influences especially those of new German expressionism. He worked his own frequently on paper, which reflects his own genesis, with reams of marginalia, comments, texts, photographs, his procedural, palimpsestic side.
“Very unquiet urban still lifes, with lots of noise”, clarifies Fernández-Cid in an especially serendipitous description of the painter’s brilliant cycle, which focusses on those containers where leftover material from building work is deposited. Those containers are a very contemporary piece of urban equipment, as are telephone cabins which were ever present, as I pointed out earlier, in his output in New York. For more than a century the modern street has been a place of pure noise, something which the futurists were familiar with (Luigi Russolo: L’arte dei rumori, 1915), as well as Spain’s dear ultraists (a few Galicians among them: I am referring mainly to Eugenio Montes, who described an imaginary New York in verse, and who wanted to use the word “Skyscrapers” as the title for magazine in Orense which never came to light), and the Mexican stridentists who proclaimed their love for the smell of petrol, and the São Paulo modernists, and Blaise Cendrars, a friend of the former group, and Fernand Léger, who wrote, in a publication executed together with the great poster designer Cassandre, the absolutely definitive words “The show is in the street…”. The modern street: full of noisy, strident sounds, not to mention visual noise.
Since first coming across Quintana Martelo’s captivating containers series, part of which was included in his Orense exhibition in 2015, I admit to having discovered a new feature of the city. Art helps us, yet again, to see the world. Brassaï and other photographers, together with painters like Dubuffet and Tàpies, taught us how to see graffiti. Thanks to the painter of this exhibition who I am writing about here, I have realized, yet again, that the show is indeed in the street and I have noticed the enormous number of containers populating the streets of Madrid and the rest of Spain. And I have also realized that these mobile architectures, these “geometric planimetries” (to use the charming term he describes them with again) which have something in common with those large minimalist sculptures, always ornamented with lettering to better and worse results (some are frankly awful, but others are almost good, and sometimes they even echo the great age of typefaces created by the aforementioned Cendrars and Léger, by Torres-García and his friend and compatriot Rafael Barradas, or by Spain’s Gabriel García Maroto when he had his printers and publishing house Biblos). The lettering refers to the proprietors (Aluche, Arcón, B.G., Boluda, Cano, Codisan Contenedores, Conte Vigo, Contenedores Madrid, Contrasa, Cora Reciclat, L. Coronel, Cosersa, Couceiro, Cruz, DSR, Durán, Hnos. San Juan S. A., Maconsa, Mai, Osconsur, Parque, J. Pedraza, Prisma, Rivas, Rodríguez y Sobrinos, Sacotran, Salmedina, Seurcon, S. V., Tan Automoción, Toysal, Transhelmut… a prosaic litany, to which I could add a few more names of ones I’ve seen around my neighbourhood in Madrid), which are companies that appeal directly to their clients (sometimes with just a simple telephone number) turning the sides of the containers into adverts aimed at them. In this case, art is the channel through which all of this, I repeat, this whole reality, reaches me.
Quintana Martelo, who is fond of turning his paintings into personal diaries, adds handwritten comments and his own lettering to the typefaces decorating the geometry of the containers (something which he already carried out in a few of his New York paintings: I am thinking of Rose Street, for example, from 1993-1998, or of Canal Street, from 2000) with Madrid street names (Augusto Figueroa, Don Tello, Duque de Medinaceli, Guadarrama, Hermosilla, Limón, Lope de Vega, Marqués de Cubas, Reina, Tetuán, Velázquez), with streets of Santiago de Compostela (General Pardiñas), of Vigo (Orillamar: a curious toponym which I have always liked…), of Guernica (Don Tello), of Sant Cugat del Vallès (Francesc Macià), and so on…
The formats which Quintana Martelo tends to resort to in the larger-sized pieces of this cycle are truly heroic, and they would fit in with the period of the New York School perfectly. Seldom have I seen work sustained to this extent in the genre of drawing, and which ends up acquiring a truly imposing, monumental presence. Radiant and brilliant at the same time. Built upon the most quotidian and prosaic of things, and yet reaching to the peak of the sublime. “The Sublime is Now”, said Barnett Newman. As if the ray of sunlight that dazzled Quintana Martelo one day nearly ten years ago in the Marqués de Cubas street in Madrid had been immortalized.
Juan Manuel Bonet
Curator of the exhibition