2023-09-21 20:13:50
Changing of the guard in La Pedrera. It goes Jaume Plensa And enter Antonio Lopez (1936). The humanistic sculpture of the Catalan leaves and the magical and figurative realism of Tomelloso enters. So goodbye to Flora, the monumental head that spoke from the street with Gaudí’s building, and warm welcome hugs for ‘Carmen dormida’, the bronze head that presides from the patio of Casa Milà over the first major retrospective that Barcelona presents. dedicated to the artist from La Mancha. A complete and generous review of more than seven decades of career that travels from the rooftops of ‘Boy with a Shooter’, one of his first oil paintings, to the Montjuïc mountain, where he began painting a couple of years ago a landscape of Barcelona.
On the canvas, a central spot of color in which the Venetian Towers of Plaza España, the columns of Puig i Cadafalch and the two sculptures that flank the MNAC staircase can be distinguished. “1 ¼ End of January 2022. I started January 25”, can be read on one of the sides of the canvas, one of the six unfinished and “in progress” works that the exhibition includes. Next to it, a very extensive collection of paintings, sculptures and drawings («drawing has always suggested a lot to me», celebrates) that vindicates López as a master of the everyday and a great portraitist of life itself.
Because, he assures, for there to be art there must be life. And Spanish painting, he laments, had a way of painting life that in its beginnings he could not decipher. «I went to the Prado Museum every Sunday, first to mass and then to the Prado, and I couldn’t afford it. He looked devoutly at everything, which was enormous. And when I had difficulties in school I went there, but it was of absolutely no use to me. There was never an answer,” recalls the man from La Mancha when remembering how much it cost him to tune in as a young man to certain artists. «Life, the life of Spain, until Goya arrives, you only see it in Velázquez. And you always see it. In those nudes, in those legs… But it was very difficult for me to see Spanish art; It was a huge effort. It is such an extremely anti-rhetorical art that you need to know about life and know a lot about everything,” he explains.
Furthermore, he adds, «Spain is little painted». «You see all the painters of the Quattrocento and the backgrounds are their cities. Velázquez also makes the backgrounds he needs, he paints a landscape, but he does not pay attention to them. The Germans have to arrive, with Master Dürer, and discover the beauty of a plant; of the little bug that climbs the stem. Why wasn’t it a Spaniard? Because we believe that man is the center of creation, and that has done a lot of damage,” he says.
look at reality
They had to arrive Giorgio di Chirico, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall so that López learned to “look at reality.” “Life is what will decipher you, everything has to come from there,” López insists seconds before getting down to work and walking around the La Pedrera exhibition hall guiding around twenty journalists. “You are always afraid of coming across your work, because you might not like it,” says López, 87 years old who seems a few years younger and has a gallery of trophies that include the Velázquez Prize for Fine Arts and the Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts.
The panic, however, does not last long, because López recognizes himself. And he likes it. «There are a couple of places that are very revealing to me. “They have taught me a lot about my own work,” she reveals in relation to the group of sculptures that greet the visitor and, she assures, show “deeper areas” of his creation. “It’s something that wasn’t in the previous exhibitions, which have all been very similar,” she adds. ‘Boyfriends’, from 1955, is not far away, one of López’s two family portraits has just been acquired by the Reina Sofía and who knows if it could change the course of the relations between the museum and the artist. «The Reina Sofía is for modern art, she is for us. But there are some people there who are the directors who choose what they want to show. She also happens in the Prado. It is always the taste of the person who carries the things. And it has to be like that,” she relativizes.
Antonio López, in front of one of his canvases ADRIÁN QUIROGA
Following his first works, those with which he began to emerge in the mid-fifties, López tests his connections with the dream world and ends up concluding that how could he not get along well with it? surrealism having been born where he did. «For a boy, Tomelloso’s life world was very surreal, so I understood surrealism because I lived it. “Some mysterious things were told that were really wonderful,” he says. Years later, he adds, those lines are still there. Or they have returned after a long detour. «In my latest things surrealism appears again; something that is not the objective world, that is below », he points out.
Freedom
It is not the only connection between his past and his present. “The freedom of the beginning reminds me of what I have been doing these years,” López slips while reviewing family sculptures, frescoes engraved in bronze, skinned rabbits, amazing pencil drawings, intimate scenes bathed by different types of light and overwhelming Madrid landscapes. »What leads me to paint a city is not the light; It is the city itself, what tells you. “It’s what I like,” she says. There they are, to attest, the unfinished landscape of the Gran Vía or that great panoramic view of the north of Madrid from La Maliciosa that he painted between 1962 and 1963.
With ‘The Dinner’ (1980), ‘Ice Fridge’ (1966) or the interiors of his own house the domestic returns. The intimate. Life, once again. The city and housing. «The place where we live our lives has been done little in Spain. And it’s a shame, because life is very good,” López insists as he leaves behind him living and dead life and large bronze sculptures. The enigma of modern art that he began to decipher by joining “little pieces” more than seven decades ago, resolved in eighty works and a good trail of penetrating glances.
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