Abel Quezada Rueda

Abel Quezada Rueda presents Recent Work at the GAM.

I know few artists with the extensive pictorial culture of Abel Quezada Rueda: he knows the minutiae of Flemish technique as well as reductionism, he has thoroughly studied Paolo Uccello's canvases and he understands Cézanne as well as Ellsworth Kelly or Robert Mangold. By cycles his own work swings pendulum between his love of classical forms, particularly landscape, and a vocation for the avant-garde. In both cases it is about thinking and rethinking the issues until arriving at a decanted look. Even the most deliberate sporadic works are the result of an intellectual rigor that he does not know how to give up. He creates an interdependence between the pieces in such a way that they make full sense in the serial context. Here his simplicity is that of the way back: complexity tamed. Under the sign of austerity, Abel restricts his palette, demands each color, highlights the volumes, redoubles the balance; he purifies like a mystic of renunciation who seeks the lyricism of the desert or like an arduous Spinoza who finds nature, man and god through the geometric method. In his inventiveness there is no room for complacency or the gesture of irresponsible spontaneity: he leaves a narrow slot for the most intense expression to flourish and that is where we find his oasis.

— Claudio Isaac