"(...) he proceeds by intuition to establish an art of metaphysics and yearning, in which presence--the sheer affect of being--proves itself central to his esthetic. In fact, presence as both a source and expression of creativity vivifies itself regularly in Quintana Martelo´s art, which has moved from a skilled discussion of realism to a side-by-side involvement with abstraction and figuration; his diptychs tell the story of Quintana Martelo's involvement with New York, where he makes his home part of the year, and Spain, his homeland, which has furnished him with a language of transcendent objectivity.
(...)It is Quintana Martelo´s wish, then, to occupy two spaces at once:
the broad, gesturally informed expansiveness of the abstraction and the particular shapes of an everyday realism that emphasizes the artistÕs presence through objects--brushes, dishes, fruit-- that function as stand-ins for his person. It wasnÕt always this way; if one looks at Quintana Martelo´s paintings of the early and mid-1990s, it is clear that an exacting verisimilitude was key to his art: in painting after painting during this period, the artist returns to a compelling idiom of newspapers, fruit, vegetables, umbrellas, and flowers, in which the objects portray the fabric of a life lived in the language of form(...)".
Jonathan Goodman