x5°. 1963. Courtesy of the Museum of Modem Art. New York.Gift of the Staempfli Gallery.

Antonio IUpez Garcia, The Apparition (Laaparici6n),oil on wood. 21O31WM

The Visionary Candor of Antonio Lopez Garcfa

ANDRE VAN DER WENDE
collection ever assembled in this country) notable, but it is the
profundity of his work that warrants the most recognition.
contemporary issues, realism currently suffers from
onsidered
an overbearing deference
by some which tothat
in fidelity
visual
a passdtoform errs
engage If the measure of realism lay in the veracity of its preci-
sion, L6pez Garcia would win hands down. However, he is
either toward the academic, or the illustrative. That's not
equally adept at investing rich layers of meaning within the
the case with Spanish realist Antonio L6pez Garcia, who is
most mundane and grotesque of subjects: a bleak toilet, the
enough of a household name in Spain to be satirized on
detritus of a meal, or a skinned rabbit coiled in a bowl all
Spanish television, but whose renown in this country is
ruddy and red. By taking a thing both repellent and oddly
more analagous to that of cult hero.
For someone whom the critic Robert Hughes once attractive, L6pez Garcia causes us to re-examine our notions
of beauty and how we see, turning the ordinary into the
called "the greatest realist artist alive," L6pez Garcia has
failed to register a higher profile due to the slow pace at extraordinary and rendering a poetic equilibrium that
becomes an affirmation of life, even in the face of death.
which he works. His canvases often take years; one major
sculpture, Man and Woman, took so long L6pez Garcia has always existed outside of the ebb and
flow of prevailing trends. He is an artist who is deeply
(twenty-six years), L6pez Garcia started to
dream that the male figure was following engaged in a personal discourse with art history, embracing
him around. Solo exhibitions, particularly its conventions to record his own notions of the human spiri-
- -
tual condition.
in the United States, take on a similar span
of years. His last one was in 1986 at his Tradition is the foundation upon which L6pez Garcia
current representative, the Marlborough transcribes the world he sees, and it is also the thread that
Gallery in New York. Before that was 1968, cornnects him to the MFA's complementary Spanish exhibition
at New York's Staempfli Gallery. El Greco to Veldzquez: Art during the Reign of PhilipIII. With the
That alone makes the Museum of Fine ascension of Philip III at the end of the sixteenth century,
came an era of conspicuous celebration, building, and piety.
Antonio L6pez Garcfa. 2006. Courtesy o||Antonio t6pez Arts, Boston's, survey of some fifty paint-
The benefits of travel were widely touted, and art began to
Garcla. Provided by the Museum of FineAe•s. Boston. ings, drawings, and sculpture (the largest

April/May 2008 ART NEw ENGLAND 15


Antonio L6pez Garcia. Atocha (Espaao).oil on wood. 1964, Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection. Courtesy of Antonio L6pez Garcia. Provided by the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: Steven Tucker.
shed its stringent lifelessness as it moved
towards a more naturalist approach.
By providing a modem counterpoint, L6pez
Garcia "honors that tradition and in a sense, re-
invented it for himself," says MFA Beal Curator
Cheryl Brutvan, curator of the L6pez Garcia
show. While the exhibition posits the idea that
L6pez Garcia is an extension of a Spanish art
based on the tenets of naturalism and human-
ism, it is just as important to recognize
the impact of Spain's mountainous iso-
lation on the national psyche.
"I think Antonio, in a sense, accept-
ed that (isolation)," says Brutvan. "IHel
even thrived in it and found all the truths
that you might find in a VelAzquez or
[Juan SAnchez] Cotin, but from this
contemporary viewpoint, and through
his own ability to understand through study
and observation, a metaphorical relationship to
the very primary things of the world and life."
L6pez Garcia can combine the precision of
Andrew Wyeth with the psychological opacity of
Vermeer, or even Edward Hopper, but he never
descends into nostalgia or obsequious referenc-
ing. His life-size sculpture Man and Woman belies
traces of Egyptian statuary and classical Greek
sculpture, right down to the man's contrapposto
stance, but they are a resolutely modem couple,
dearly born of the twentieth century.
16 ART NEW ENGLAND April/May 2008
I .
-- ' U¢=
Born in 1936 in Tomelloso, Ciudad Real, just
months before the Spanish Civil War, L6pez
Garcia makes no direct reference to the trauma
of Spain's past, though one cannot help but
think that the melancholy in his work is an
indirect result of it. Encouraged by an uncle
who was also an artist, L6pez Garcia was a pre-
cocious talent who moved to Madrid at the age
of thirteen to study at the San Fernando Royal
kopez Garcfa can combine the precisioin
C f Andrew Wyeth with the psychologic al
op acity of Vermeer, or even Edward Hopi :)er, methodical effort to paint a quince tree
but he never descends into nostalgia
or obsequious referencing.
Academy of Fine Arts. Once there, he became
associated with a burgeoning realist movement.
At the time, however, L6pez Garcia was barely
heard above the din of Antoni TApies and the
towering strength of abstraction in Spanish art.
From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, L6pez
Garcia's work had a surrealist twist, with float-
ing objects and figures that earned him the tag
of "magic realist."
He eventually abandoned the use of dis-
parate realities cobbled together in order to
focus on a single reality. Atoclia (1964) is a tran-
sitional painting, depicting one of his first views
of urban Madrid: a naked couple are locked in
an intimate embrace, seemingly unaware of
their brazen exposure in the shadows of apart-
ment buildings and open streets. However, his
work still has that hangover of disjointed
worlds, so that even when his figures are not
floating, the image is no less surreal. By 1967,
an unadulterated observation of one subject
became L6pez Garcia's norm, as in his painting
Sink and Mirror.
Full of painstaking, serious intent to collect
and coalesce all manner of perceptions from his
subject, the intensity of L6pez Garcia's struggle
for resolution over reality (and, by extension,
mortality), is what gives his work power. We
are taught to see again and, gladly, we have
L6pez Garcia to do most of the work for us by
distilling the essence of a presence and the
tranquility of a moment.
His images are vulnerable, operating with-
in the paradox of an attempt to commit to a
reality that will always be evasive to the
accounting of time. Despite his best efforts,
nothing remains fixed, and that effort to make
the intangible more concrete gives the work a
brittle infrastructure that hovers between the
real and the fantastic. Hinting at narratives
gleaned from a world at hand-while also
referring to a world at large-L6pez Garcia
perpetrates a "through-the-looking-glass"
quality by creating a new pictorial reality graft-
ed from meticulous observation.
L6pez Garcia gives one the culminating expe-
rience of what it is like to see through the eyes
of another, but when one watches him work, one
cannot help but think there's something quite
mad about the whole enterprise. In
Victor Erice's poetic 1992 film El Sol del
Mettbrillo (Sunlight on the Quince Tree),
which chronicles L6pez Garcia's
in his backyard, L6pez Garcia is as much
an engineer as a painter, carefully meas-
uring distances and calibrating light.
As the seasons progress and the fruit
bears heavy, L6pez Garcia ties them back into
position before he vainly casts a tent over the tree
to protect them from the rains and, eventually,
winter. (The film will be screened several times in
the MFA's Remis Auditorium during the exhi-
bition's duration; see www.mfa.org for times.)
Had L6pez Garcia not become an artist, it
seems he may well have been a scientist or a
member of the clergy, so quietly driven is his
quest. Certainly, he attempts to voice his vision
within a framework that straddles discipline,
method, and faith. There is the same streak of
sustained devotion and perseverance-as well
as patience-that adds an inherently Spanish
level of penance and humility to the work.
LUpez Garcia's meticulous craft augments
the viewers' satisfaction and, while one can
marvel at his virtuosity (the arbitration of light
and the precise delineation of space and vol-
ume), it never overwhelms the emotional res-
onance. LUpez Garcfa disperses light like a
physical layer: it covers as much as it reveals,
and carries one into dim stretches of corridors
and flat, stained rooms, as in Toilet and Window.
Yet, for a style we often associate with
tightlipped edges and clean surfaces, there is
surprising range within his work. Graphite
drawings of a quince tree are drafted with
minute detail that hark back to Darer. Maria,
a hallucinatory portrait of his ten-year-old
daughter, modulated with infinite gradations of
tone, provides a convincing indictment against
the fallacy of photography. The Dinner is full of
loose edges and hesitations, while the gritty
mottled surface and chalky palette of Atocha is
a revelation. Even the firm grip of Sink and
Mirrorreveals drips and blemishes incorporated
into its final stasis. And while LUpez Garcfa is
a superb colorist, he is more concerned with
the sensation of color as it pertains to light;
color per se never declares itself above all else.
Perspective and measured articulation may
be important, but equally important is that the
paintings feel right, and as L6pez Garcia wres-
tles to locate himself in space, remarkable
things happen. In Lucio's Balcony, a painting
that evolved over a bewildering twenty-eight Antonio Ldpez Garcia, Percha con Ropa (Clothes Rackl, polychrome wood, 58 x49 x 11".1963-64. Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection.
years, horizons shift and lines bend at precise
angles, causing the painting to reel and sway
in a slightly dizzying fisheye effect-it can be
noticeably odd, but palpably right.
Whatever the subject---staggering views of
urban Madrid, the clinical provisions of a stark
room-L6pez Garcfa's eye is morally centered to
record a truth devoid of sentiment or melo-
drama, stripped down to an essential inner
life (he refers to it as "nobility") that is akin to
seeing for the first and last time. There may be
a certain futility in trying to pin the world
down with his visionary candor, but like the
best before him, we're aroused by his dignity,
comforted by his compassion, and astonished
to know there's always more to see.

Antonio Ldpez
Garcia, Skinned Rabbit {Conejo Desolladol.1972.
Andrg van der Wende is an artistand writer who lives
on Cape Cod. He has been writing about art and popu-
lar culturefor the past ten years, and is the art critic
for The Cape Cod Tunes.
Antonio l.6pez Garcla, Sink andMintor,oil on wood. 1967. Melvin Blake and
FrankPurnell Collection. Courtesy Antonio Upez Garcla. Provided by the
Museum of Fine Arns,Boston.

April/May 2008 ART NEw ENGLAND 17

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TITLE: From Mundane to Metaphoric: The Visionary Candor of

Antonio L%opez Garc%ıa
SOURCE: Art N Engl 29 no3 Ap/My 2008

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