Abel Quezada

Proyectos Monclova is pleased to announce the exhibition Visual Memories by Abel Quezada, a show that brings together oil paintings, watercolors, and tapestries made with wool from different countries. The exhibition highlights both the artist’s technical skill in the use of diverse pictorial materials and his interest in a wide range of themes.

Abel Quezada’s work has been widely recognized for his contributions as a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, and painter. Although political cartooning was his primary activity, over the years he pursued an in-depth exploration of painting—especially in oil, a discipline he practiced rigorously every Sunday. His paintings include portraits of well-known and unknown figures, characters observed during his travels, or imagined altogether.

The exhibition is organized around three thematic axes that traverse his body of work: sports, travel memories, and landscapes.

The first section showcases the artist’s visual imagination related to sports, reflecting his long-standing collaboration with newspapers that specialized in sports chronicles since the 1940s. The works include football and baseball scenes, with aerial compositions that capture the dynamism of the game, as well as portraits of billiard players and a notable oil painting of American boxer John L. Sullivan, considered the first world heavyweight champion under the Marquess of Queensberry rules (gloved boxing). This painting, inspired by a famous photograph by Elmer Chickering, reinterprets the iconic pose of the pugilist and adds recognizable elements from the sport.

Another section features paintings inspired by his work-related travels, in which Quezada attentively observed landscapes, everyday scenes, and portraits of characters he encountered along the way. Works such as Mexicans on the Orient Express (1987) and Taxi with Mexican Tourists in Dense London Fog depict figures from Mexico’s political class and upper social strata during their stays abroad.

The exhibition also includes tapestries based on drawings made during his 1973 trip through Canada, England, Belgium, France, the former Soviet Union, and China, as part of the entourage of President Luis Echeverría Álvarez. During this journey, Quezada documented his impressions through sketches, notes, and Polaroid photographs, materials that later gave rise to the book 48,000 Kilometers on the Line of Origin, from which the exhibited tapestries are derived.

Finally, the exhibition brings together urban landscape paintings and watercolors, including Self-Portrait in a City with a River, in which an aerial view shows a city crossed by a river, surrounded by buildings, cars, and an airport. In this way, the exhibition of Abel Quezada reflects not only the artist’s primary interests but also the visual memories he inscribed into his work.

— Proyectos Monclova