Manuel Antonio Cuevas Vidueiro
Inmovilizado por calidad (Held for Quality)
- Year
- 2026
- Medium
- Action · oil self-portraits in public space, tape and daily record
- Size
- 20 × 20 cm each self-portrait
- Series
- Actions
In a city subjected to quality control —lines closed for improvement, driverless trains, help by video call, neighbours pushed out by rent—, Vidueiro seals his own self-portraits and leaves them to age in the street. Who decides which face has quality? The action is in preparation: the day-by-day record, the video and the fate of each self-portrait will be published here soon.
Curatorial concept
In industry, «held» is the word put on a piece that has failed inspection: it is taken off the line, sealed and set aside, waiting for someone to decide whether it will be repaired or discarded. Vidueiro takes that label and sticks it on his own face.
Small oil self-portraits, painted by hand, are tied to fences and walls in Madrid, crossed by a yellow tape that reads «inmovilizado por calidad» (held for quality), and left out in the open. Every day the artist returns, stands on the same spot and photographs what remains: rain, sun and passers-by decide the fate of each face. Some will return to the studio as remnants; others will disappear. None of them count towards the project's thousand self-portraits: they are the part of production that never reaches the line.
The action takes place in a city that, in the autumn of 2026, measures itself by the logic of quality. Madrid is living through a year of improvement works: a metro line closed for months for renovation, another with weekends out of service while automatic trains are tested to carry almost twice as many passengers, ticket machines where help arrives by video call. The city is optimised so that more people can move, faster. At the same time, many of those who live in it protest because rent is pushing them out: the efficiency of flows coexists with people who stand still, held.
Vidueiro, a painter who came from Santiago de Cuba, knows well the checks that decide who goes through and who is left waiting. His project, Autorretrativismo, sets out to paint a thousand self-portraits in ten years in the age of the selfie, when images of oneself are produced by the million and discarded in seconds. «Inmovilizado por calidad» takes that question to the street —who decides which face has «quality» and which one is withdrawn— and answers with the opposite of speed: a slow, handmade work, left to age in public, whose daily record turns decay into testimony. To create is not to represent, but to bear witness.
The image of the sealed self-portrait on the door of a train is a simulation, an impossible gesture: the held piece travels at full speed. It is the image of a city that moves ever faster while many of its inhabitants cannot move at all.
