Art surpasses nature. The idea of the union between art and nature of the 18th century reformulated the ancient thought of art as a union of science and virtue.

Antonio Lopez takes from nature his raw subject , but after submitting it to a mysterious operation, it results from his hand so impregnated with ideal, that his figures are no longer natural although they give the impression of being so.

According to the classics, the human figure is what gives art its nature, and Antonio López is, in my opinion, a painter of man. He paints him and seeks to present what is proper only to him: his spirit, his morality. All the other themes are impregnated with the presence of man, that is why it is not relevant that his image appears because it is implicit in them. In his work, all the figures acquire that dose of morality that the human condition gives them.

The unity between the natural form and the essence that corresponds to it is what provides the beauty of the work, which is not seen with the natural senses, but is perceived with another dimension that is precisely what the painter strives to reveal, using accessible and perishable materials for this abstract and infinite purpose.

There is no quince as beautiful as the one Antonio painted, no contemporary man in maturity as imposing as his, no Madrid as attractive as the one in his canvases. Just as no victory was more exalted than that of Samothrace, no Apollo more handsome than that of Belvedere, no thistle as tasty as that of Sánchez-Cotán.

His work today faces the same themes and enigmas on which we continue to reflect since antiquity, from Plato to Kant and while the art of the twentieth century by fragmenting the figures has produced that crushing effect of the natural unity necessary in the artistic work , Antonio, has proceeded in another way facing the unit to issues such as scale, situations or environment. In the society of the tendency to uniformity, he chose the solitary path.

The necessary unity of the work of art, which the contemporary world sometimes tends to confuse with totalitarianism that equalizes and subdues everything, and that by dissolving man in the multitude, abandons precisely the essential artistic object, the object that gives art its own nature.

The unanimous recognition of our time of Antonio Lopez as a master, is a sign of hope in a convulsed and disoriented era. In an environment of austerity and without great resources but with the generosity of the land and its people, Antonio López found his vocation to transmit beauty by manifesting nature, with the financial aid of art.