Manolo Quejido's Ladies depicts the interior of the same room as his Tabiques (Partitions], also painted in 1991, an in-depth exploration of the enigma whereby a painting can have innumerable forms of capacity, even though it is an eminently flat, opaque surface — a partition wall, in other words.

Ladies shows another facet of this duality between plane and volume. Here, the artist establishes a scene with characters and uses it to delineate different planes of depth. However, he is more equivocal when it comes to the architecture. On the one hand, in the place featuring the partition, our view is confused by the presence of several different sets of openings and nooks and crannies. Nonetheless, as in Mirrors — Quejido's succession of works from the 1980s — any spatial contradiction can be resolved if it is explained as a divertimento, showing a painting within a painting. In Ladies, however, there is something else that hinders a conventional, volumetric understanding of the architecture. Quejido clearly marks the edges between the different walls, with the notable exception of the point at which the floor and walls of the room should meet. Viewed in this way, as if there were no floor, the work is consistent with the flatness of the picture. The characters, too, appear to merge in that shallow depth.

At the same time, the lack of any distinction between walls and floor — that homogeneity in which they are fused in the two-dimensional — raises the issue of the background and the figure. We often think that, because of the clear division of their outlines, the figures can easily be detached from their respective backgrounds and thus become independent of them. In Ladies, however this abstraction is complicated; because the contours are rounded, they take on a mitigated version of the colour of the adjoining background. While they do enclose the figure, they convey the fact that it inevitably derives from the mother background at the same time. Thus, when it comes to the relationship between figure and background, the outlines in this work do not speak of rupture, but of solidarity and mutual belonging, diminishing the solidity of the otherwise silent and faceless figures, a reference to the difficult concept of the silhouette — a problem that has occupied part of Quejido's painting and thinking since his youth.

In Ladies, however there is room for logical operations that are not compatible with the previous ones. For example, the items of furniture have no outlines, but are instead painted firmly in black. And so, despite the schematic nature of their structure, it is precisely the figures of the chairs that are most consistent, most independent of the background. This is important, since they locally determine the plane of the floor. Whereas the ground was previously cancelled out by the removal of the dihedral floor/wall spaces, now it is doubly defined: first, by the ends of the three legs of one chair; and secondly by the two parallel lines on which the other chair rests.

Something about this emphasis on the floor and the repose of the chairs, together with the prominent bearing of the seated figures, suggests that this part of Ladies is a grand gateway to the painting. Corporeally, that gate almost belongs to our space, while, perhaps, what lies beyond it is all merely pictorial and illusory. Ladies corresponds to Diego de Velázquez's Las Hilanderas (The Spinners or the Fable of Arachne), in which the proximate corporeality of the spinners and their material work contrasts with several more distant planes of representation and mythology.

Quejido has found a keeper for his gate: the small figure whose feet stand just on the ground line of the painting. According to the laws of perspective, he is projected at his true size, providing a sense of scale for all that lies behind. However, because he is only a child, and still growing, his height cannot be taken as a yardstick for anything else. The infant gatekeeper knows that we should not try to seek measurements in the painting, which is both volume and plane, solid and silhouette, background and figure, truth and reverie.

Beatriz Velázquez