Inmaculada Jiménez Caballero, School of Architecture, University of Navarra, Spain
Antonio López the painter of reality
Antonio Lopez and the sample of all his work in the European cultural golden mile is one of the cultural events of the moment.
It is difficult to explain the figure of the master and the magnetism of his painting in the current art scene. The contemporary art fairs of reference letter offer us installations, video-creations, performances, and so many other undisputed episodes that the new paths of creation propose.
However, among all this, it is curious to see the value of this artist who has no more resource than the oil and brush on canvas or board, the modeling of round bulk almost always larger than natural scale, and above all, the drawing: graphite on paper, that's all.
More than a realist painter, Antonio Lopez is the painter of reality, and it is precisely there, in my opinion, where lies the interest of his work and the fascination it provokes. Much more than the skill of his official document, it is the clarity of his gaze what is unusual about each work. Each piece offers us something more than what it represents, something that we find difficult to discover or that we do not even guess, and in this he assimilates himself to those other striking manifestations that are the protagonists of international fairs. His work, at final, is as current as all the others.
It is not about the exceptionality of a naturalist painter in the midst of an artistic world bewildered by an endless number of manifestations; it is about an artist as contemporary as any other, who resorts to the traditional form of painting or sculpture to face the great questions of the human soul, living in the society that corresponds to him, without avoiding any of its conflicts and facing the usual loneliness.
His deep and penetrating gaze is the tool that allows him to discover in the model all that makes it true. In each of his works there is "everything" as he likes to say about Velázquez, but his gaze unfolds on a rigorous and scientific work that turns it into an authentic research on the form and its attributes.
It is false to think that such faithful representations of any of his subjects respond only to an acquired mastery, to a certain ease or even to a natural talent. Each work is the result of a meticulous work that occupies all his time, that refers him to the masters he admires, that questions him on the subjects he deals with or that facilitates the exchange of opinions with his colleagues and friends.
Antonio's work is above all the intense work of an honest man, of a passionate of life, of a lover of beauty that penetrates through all the senses, and the effect of a simple life that runs in a difficult city in which he finds the necessary universe for his artistic creation.