The balconies have been an initiatory revelation in the case of Antonio López (Tomelloso, 89 years old). Play on the sidewalks, a statement of intentions. With the open windows of his childhood house Manchega began to intuit that he attracted the exterior of himself more than the interior tribulations to paint it from a certain height. He did it first in his hometown, with a first picture of Calle de Carboneros, which still retains and which is never going to undo, he says, “if possible …”. Then he continued that path as a student at the Madrid pension on the street of Independence that gave directly to the Plaza de Isabel II, in Madrid, when he moved to the capital to study Fine Arts. Soon he wanted to go down with the easel and the asphalt brushes. Take it, look from there, let yourself be soaked by the air, even if it was contaminated and by the miracle of the enigmas of a light as elusive as changing.
He did it conscientiously and soon. “I was lucky to intuit what my songs were as an artist from a young age. And, apart from the human body, the man, the woman, the children, the trees, the flowers, one fundamental was housing and, another, the city.”
From there, he wanted to capture it obsessively. First Tomelloso, then Madrid. Today is, without a doubt, the painter of the capital, his chronicler in plastic images, his best ally on the canvases, the color lover that the city waited for a long time. Who knows it more thoroughly, the one who has treated her with the most. “It is a city with a delicious content, that of its people, but a worthy modesty,” he says.
He says it in the house where he lives with a study near Chamartín, soaked the quinces – especially the one who portrayed in his film Victor Erice – the limits and olive trees in his garden, one day of April with rain. There he knows how to guide us between a maze of fabrics, plaster, dry brushes that point to heaven, tired spatulas and eagerly easels of service, greenish strokes on the ground to delimit his correct position when painting and stripes on the wall at the height of his eyes to mark the perspective without truce. He welcomes us with his outfit marked by discreet paint, fixed look and the exact words to express the realization of what he pursues and the mystique of the trade that guides his hands.
“Madrid has painted little and late,” in his opinion. Spain, as a landscape issue, too. That, for him, far from being an inconvenience, has meant his main advantage. I had all the lane to explore it thoroughly. A preceding teacher was Aureliano de Beruete (Madrid, 1845-1912), says López, although in other parts of the country they will also highlight figures such as Sorolla or his uncle, Antonio López Torres, who started him in art since childhood.
To do it as it should, according to the creator, that is, naturally, in the open field, in situ, it was impossible before the impressionists. “The tubes had not been invented and you couldn’t move anything to anywhere.” But that courage lasted little. “Then came modernity and avant -garde with its new languages and, among them, there was no landscape or nature.” Even so, Madrid did not have before those painters to emulate the impulse of other teachers in northern Europe, as Durero, their first great reference in that sense; The Van Eyck brothers, Vermeer and their Delft views, already in the south, Caretto delivered to Venice.
As Lopez is the son of eclecticism and enjoys it, he has become the great urban landscape of our time to pleasure. For that he had to overcome a certain shyness to be planted with all the paraphernalia of a painter in the street: “It is violent,” he admits. It was when he began to conceive the already legendary picture of the Gran Vía at the crossroads with Alcalá. He started in 1974. “Franco lived,” he recalls. And it ended in 1981. It is, therefore, perhaps, the masterpiece in silence and with the empty sidewalks of the democratic transition. A metaphor of that expectant tension perhaps without him pretending. It was not difficult to find the best perspective, that islet in the intercession of both avenues: “The entire beginning of the Gran Vía was seen in a wonderful way, there was no other place, I walked down, I found a way to put myself, maybe you do not always get it, but I think it was the exact point.”
He worked in summer, at dawn. “I find it hard to get up early, but I liked the experience that I made that effort so much. There were days that I was not able to plant the easel and I returned home. It was very violent, it was the fact of being there, I had to overcome that first difficulty. Now, if I managed to place myself with the right light, I got hooked and I was caught by that extraordinary thing, by the place, by that street with similar heights, very contaminated.
He never left that place, wanted to paint him again after the dawn at height and continue until sunset in the Plaza de España, where they left a balcony not very high in the tower of Madrid. There he caught the last sun ray. He continued from this to west in seven paintings with different angles of the Gran Vía in more series. Today his experience in Callao continues with a new attempt, a new vision of his obsessive artery. “The Gran Vía is something unreal, not a street to live. For me it represents a phenomenon of ways seen from above with the summer light, it impresses me a lot, there is a very dreamlike, unreal sensation. I will continue these next months there, from early May to September, that is the ideal time to address that issue,” he explains.
He will not finish this time in the Plaza de España. “They have changed it now and I can’t follow. Many of the ideas I have started to elaborate I know that I will not continue, things change and you also change. I find it very easy to start, but sometimes I get tired because I am not going to find a model, because I am going to get bored, but I do not care.”
-What will undoubtedly end is his vision at 360 degrees of the Puerta del Sol. “It is an issue that has been interested for a long time, but whenever I started there were works. Bad luck. Now they have stopped and, finally, I am painting it. I placed myself in the middle of the extent in steps. At the exact point between the streets of carts, Alcalá, Arenal and Major. Almost in front of the community building.”
The location has its inconvenience. Some passersby recognize him and ask for his self or congratulate him. The concentration becomes difficult and sometimes an artistic workshop is improvised with a whole living teacher without him letting him go, but eloquent left due to the merely random privilege of being able to observe it. Many do corros to curose endless. Others put the leg, like some guard that has asked for the permits in an excess of zeal, despite the warnings of those who knew him well, aware that he committed some outrage or, at least, an error.
But the artist does not eye. Know and assume the risks. Sol attracts him precisely because López sees there the neuralgic point without pretensions of a great city. The great symbol of a significant humility. “They have moved it to create space, to make room with tickets and exits to 10 streets. It is something that is very familiar to me and also a mystery. It does not seem much. Urbanistically, the scale is modest, but it is that Madrid, in the distance, has almost always been like this:“ There was nothing to highlight, now the towers of the End of the Castilian stand out. Everything else you recognize it with difficulty, but, to me, that amorphous mass of buildings that cover it is very exciting. ”
It is Spain…, he says: “Our soul, what we have done. There is no vanity, I insist. And I like it, of course I like it. Although I now begin to notice that we have become more stylish and that does not attract me so much, although if you see it, I portray it. I hope we do not continue there, it is a mixture of pride, vanity, ignorance and nonsense. Oh, what a penalty…”
Anyway, López will always have the outskirts, which he has also been faithful. For example, with its incursions in Vallecas. “It seems to me that he keeps great beauty. Simply because man has done and there people live. It may not be the part, only a nucleus without pretensions, but beautiful precisely because of that, because people inhabit it. It is not about something decorative. The painter does not choose ugly things, but the real world, life, where is it? It is called fortune, the Carabancheles are past, before Leganés, another modest place. ” A district with enough entity so that it has decided to capture it to the millimeter. “With the force of detail, which for me is very captivating, the divine detail that Nabokov was talking about.” A philosophy that gives rise to a method that requires scientific rigor of microscope, even at the risk of qualifying him as a hyperrealist … “Yes, okay, I do not agree. Hyperrealism is a very concrete movement. But you will not protest those things either.”
Towards those neighborhoods, it is launched, aware of exalting a way of life in which few are fixed to elevate to art category and take it as such a day to museums: “Madrid is made by a succession of generations, carved as a great sculpture, by layers. It is a space for survival that does not have the vanity of Paris or New York, and I like that discreet tone la obra de Galdós. No ha existido a ese nivel un Galdós de la pintura en Madrid, pienso que se tenía que haber hecho más y antes. Para empezar porque tiene, además, un valor documental muy grande. Pero no ha sido así. Velázquez vivió aquí, pero no se le ocurrió pintar una calle, algo que sí hizo en Roma. ¿Por qué? No lo sé. El caso es que acometió otras cosas muy bien y ya está: no hay que pedirle tanto. Goya He pointed out details in that regard, but neither was Madrid his great theme. ”
He speaks of two artists who portrayed the court in his day. He also commissioned a picture of the royal family that is already hung in the palace. “Such a work, if you don’t take it, don’t start it.” He had his controversy. The time it took to finish it out: just over 20 years. He asked for real heritage in 1993 and delivered it in 2014. “He left it, he took it, when he took long, you move away from the picture long seasons … If I did not see it clear, I left it. Then they called me to be interested. But they behaved very well. They left me at my rhythm. They didn’t tell me anything, but they were interested. I took it to the palace, I brought it here, it has been the painting that I moved here. I finally finished it there, where it is exposed. ”
It does not get rid of earthly controversies, but not heavenly. As another commission made by the Church for the Cathedral of Burgos. Three doors that are about to finish off and that has been the first work of sacred art that he has signed in his life. “When we finish them, we will send them there. I do not know if I am going to go, once delivered, to do what they want. What I intend is to leave them well. For me it is the first explicitly religious work that I have done and I liked it, of course. In those doors I think that my whole work is dissolved. The background of my sensitivity and my spirituality is there, but also in everything I do.”
It has been a conscious challenge that it will remain forever when it knows that religious art has lived a deep crisis for three centuries: “Simply because we believe much less than those who did notre Dame, with the demons above, on the terraces, looking Paris, and that influences everything… religious art is total art, all talents have been summoned by him, in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, music. God, and the gods, the main reason.
Special Madrid ‘The weekly Country’
This article is part of a special number dedicated to the city of Madrid published this Sunday in ‘El País Weekly’.
