Antonio López García

by Cheryl Brutvan (Contributor)

Antonio López García is one of Spain’s most revered contemporary artists. Bringing his profound visual sensitivity and mastery of light to bear on a range of deliberately quotidian subjects, López García imbues them with an extraordinary and haunting character. In 1993, his paintings and drawings were given a major retrospective at the Reina Sofía, Madrid, while Victor Erice’s 1992 documentary about López García, The Quince Tree of the Sun , received the Critics’ Prize at that year’s Cannes and top prize at the Chicago Film Festival. Yet López García’s work has rarely been exhibited outside his native country. This book, published to accompany the first major exhibition of his art in the United States (in tandem with the monumental El Greco to Velázquez exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), offers the first comprehensive overview in English of this extraordinary oeuvre. An essay by curator Cheryl Brutvan discusses López García as a descendant of the great Spanish naturalists, as well as his indebtedness to Surrealism and Magic Realism, while individual appreciations of some 50 paintings offer English-speaking readers their first opportunity to appreciate in depth the remarkable poetry and atmospheric density of this major world artist.

Genres: Art, Visual Art

160 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a large monograph on Antonio Lopez Garcia that is like a holy grail for certain friends of mine. One painter friend who is none too computer literate was sure I’d be able to find a copy for him “on the computer”, but I sadly had to inform him that the cheapest copy I could find was going for over $1000. This friend fondly remembers looking at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts library copy many years ago, until that copy vanished, presumably stolen. The prime suspect? Another friend of mine. At PAFA, which is an excellent art school but also somewhat conservative, Lopez Garcia is idolized by quite a few.

I credit my friends from there for bringing him to my attention, but when they did I realized I already knew of him, though not by name, because of a film by a Spanish director, Victor Erice, who I like very much. Erice made a film which consisted of little more than footage of Lopez Garcia working on a painting of a quince tree in his backyard, but like the elusive monograph the film itself was hard to locate. I remembered it coming through Philly at one point, but I missed it, and later I could not find a copy in any format to watch. But then last year I did locate a VHS copy of A Dream of Light at the Penn library and rushed home to watch it. It did not disappoint.

The film chronicles Lopez Garcia’s months’ long process of painting a single tree. He is an insanely methodical painter, devoted to accuracy of observation at all costs. He not only plants his feet in the exact same location for each painting session, but as the quinces ripen and pull the branches slightly lower he paints white hash marks on the leaves to indicate their location before being dragged down by the fruit. In these behaviors he comes off as a kind of soulless robot, but you soon come to realize that these technical details are an anchor and a foundation for a supremely sensual sensibility; Lopez Garcia is a man in love with everything the senses have to offer, however sweet or however foul, but he is also concerned with cold accuracy. He is a sensual scientist; and as the film makes clear he is most interested in the process of painting and how the act of intense looking draws him deeper into pleasures. He gets so wrapped up in this process that he is not even able to finish the painting before the cold and rainy season sets in; a fact that does not seem to bother him overmuch.

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What a filthy bathroom, but also what a beautiful painting!

This book is not the elusive $1000 grail, which I have never even seen, but it is an excellent book in and of itself. The reproductions are kind of small, but they are of good quality, and each painting is accompanied by an illuminating squib.

[Stephan Ferreira · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had been waiting for this book for months. It corresponds to Antonio Lopez Garcia's only US Survey in Boston. The book is terrific for cataloging works not yet put together anywhere else. But it's has too much descriptive analysis and less actual theory.

[k · Rating 4 out of 5]

CAtalog of a show up now at the MFA in Boston. Amazing painter

[A.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the catalog for the first major exhibition of Lopez Garcia's works in the United States. The reproductions are quite good and each work is accompanied by commentary on the facing page.

[Jedkimball]

Amazing!!!