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The Timeless Realism of Antonio Lopez Garcia
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18744 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
1,801 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
When he was thirteen years old, Antonio Lopez Garcia left his agrarian family in Tomelloso, a town in La Mancha, and went to Madrid to prepare for the entrance exams of the school of Fine Arts. His uncle, the realist painter Antonio Lopez Torres, had recognized his talent, and his father wanted a better life for his son. He studied (1950-55) and later taught (1960-69) in the capital, becoming one of Madrid's preeminent realist painters.
Because he is not prolific, due to his painstaking methods, Garcia (born in 1936) has had only a handful one-artist shows. Three have been in New York: two in the 1960s and one, in 1986, at his current representative, the Marlborough Gallery. His work is in the collections of several major U.S. museums. Rizzoli's 1990 English-language monograph on the artist has broadened his reputation in the United States and Great Britain. But, like many Spanish artists who came of age during the Franco era, Garcia remains little known outside Spain.
He is a versatile realist, proficient in the traditional media of pencil drawing, oil painting on board, carved wood sculpture, and bas relief in plaster. His subjects range from portraits and landscapes to still lifes and genere scenes, generally taken from life in or near his native Tomeloso or Madrid, where he now resides and works.
He was early drawn to Picasso, in whom he "sensed something dangerous ... like a corrosive acid. There was something sour, hard and aggressive, which reflected life and the human condition with intensity and a richness of expression such as I have never found in other modern artists. It both overwhelmed and somewhat frightened me." This fascination led Garcia to borrow elements from Picasso's blue and rose periods.
While other Madrid artists dabbled in international abstract Expressionism, Garcia ventured into Surrealism. He would collage disparate realist vignettes in disjoint compositions with a flok-art naivete, despite their sophisticated representational technique. This "magic realism" continued through the mid-1960s, but gradually, as he says, "the physical world gained more prestige in my eyes."
In fact he had never abandoned it. The 1959 oil Francisco Carretero and A. Lopez Garcia Talking, like many portraits and townscapes of this period, is devoid of Surrealistsc disjunctions. So are Autumn (1961) and The Sea (1960-70). Even a work like The Campo del Moro (1960) is first of all an accomplished landscape,
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