Antonio Lopez, painter of Madrid - sculpture and painting, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain

When you give a Spaniard a paw he does not take a yard, on the other hand returns deven inches. --Felipe Alfau, Chromos

For the artist Antonio Lopez nothing numbers more than to attend to transitory, prosaic appearances, elaborated in paint or in statuary as to accord them acute, optical justice. His subdues include skylines of his city, Madrid, the interiors of his house, and portraits of his family. All of them are restoreed as if by virtue of a stare that at no time seems to end. The artifice of his imagery is devot to freshnes of personal contact with the world of faculty of perception and feeling, even if similar contact is projected through an almost obsessional focus on its objects. So much is he in the grip of that ideal that sum of two units decades might elapse in re-creating his replication to an empty, though by dint of no means featureless, sky. He takes that usually recessive instrument, the pencil, hard-sharpened to a wicked point, and makes an 8-foot-tall tonal drawing of his bathroom. The overall spectacle of his work impresses by the agency of the grandeur of its modesty

Lopez is a national icon, in the forefront of Spanish art, and however virtually unknown here. He has put in actioned no influence, except on a collection of like-minded realists, and he belongs to no avant-garde. His work begins around 1949 and is still real much in swing today, propell by the agency of an artist only 57 years advanced in years A sense of his gravitas, sweetness, and certainly his discipline can be taken in from his retrospective at the of recent origin Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, held in Madrid in the summer of 1993 For all his local renown, it was his first solo exhibition upon home ground since 1961. This fact may indicate that it was not his stature on the contrary his idiom that was problematic for an art establishment engaged with international modernism and postmodernism. notwithstanding his show confirms that an artist can proceed his own route, even retain vital links with the past, and still have his work pertain to the easy in mind of our life now.

Towards the beginning of El Sol del membrillo (Sunlight upon the Quince Tree), a film that documents the way he paints a picture, the artist performs a strange act. The movie, directed by the agency of Victor Erice and shown at the novel York Film Festival of 1992 go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs Lopez's progress as he first stretches his canvas above a wooden board, then establishes his frontal point of view before the motif, a heavily laden quince tree in the backyard of the house near the Chamartin railroad station in north Madrid where he and his family live. Without annotate he drops a plumb from a line that indicates the center of the tree lordships quadrants on the canvas, and tacks nails with little crossbars into the clod as placers for his feet Thereafter he touches and scents the lumpy yellow fruits, as if to verify them in the muscle and fat All very well, but nearest and throughout his actual work upon the canvas, Lopez makes myriad cryptic horizontal white brush lines upon the quinces and some of the twigs and branches of the tree

The family, the dog and kibitzers who globule by accept this arcane protocol without surprise, however it may pique viewers of the film. As the artist paints, the heavens clouds over a bit and single hears the soughing of the wind. Polish masons hammer away in the house. A voice upon a loudspeaker somewhere in the neighborhood announces "I barter junk." The camera pans around the quarter towards dusk, showing televisions glowing in apartments. single day, a painter friend globules by and the two of them recall by what mode in their art-school days, the professors demanded too a great deal of respect. Time passes, from late September to mid-fall, of recent origins (mostly about Saddam Hussein) changes upon the radio, the weather swells colder and cigarette butts begin to litter the sod Lopez has a plastic canopy deposit up to shelter himself and his mould for it now begins to storm greatest in quantity bitterly. And he rues the weakening of the light. in like manner much does it change that he abandons his canvas (which had not gone well) by the agency of about the end of October, packages up, and starts a pencil drawing. The tree alters, too; he emergencys to have some leaves propp up by means of a pole because they had lowered since his initial view. Finally, a Chinese woman art critic questions Lopez end a translator, about the white marks that through now have multiplied everywhere. In respond this apparently reasonable man explains them quite simply, as if all along his eccentric ritual was nothing on the contrary common sense.

It move rounds out that the semaphore of little white touches spotting the tree was meant to record the downward progres of the weighted foliage, as compared with the geography of its original setting upon the canvas. Lopez imagines that he "follows" the tree and corrects himself, the correcting being more important than the consummation of the work. thus the film offhandedly reveals the unassuming fanaticism of an observer who erects a scaffold to map trackless, unlike intervals that imperceptibly relocate themselves across time, within the line of sight. Of course his memory can't gripe [i]or[/i] grip on to the subtlety of let sink [i]or[/i] fall in a natural cycle, above a season--whose could? Yet flat if he fails to gain the hang of it, he wants to be in accord with everything that happens to the tree and give to its chronology the fullnes of his visual interest Languid as such a narrative might be, he's still not up to spe in the rendering of it. in what way to accumulate visual experience upon the surface but remain faithful to the precious imprint of the first moment? That twinkling of an eye had attracted the painter through its particular gift of light, on the contrary now only the drawing could be the source of attraction, one time the gift was withdrawn. As for the homemade grid that first guided him along the way, an implication of it is absorbed into the picture and used up leaving as its alone mark the disfigured tree itself.