Antonio López’s last tweaks to Goya’s great sculpture for his home house in Fuendetodos

The painter and sculptor Antonio López Ultima a natural size sculpture of Francisco de Goya who will welcome the visitors of his home house, in the town of Fuendetodos (Zaragoza). The visit to López’s workshop in Arganda del Rey (Madrid) to verify the evolution of the work results in a day of thorough corrections and debates about the final placement of the work.

The artist, often and with an easy smile at his 89 years, has reached the Foundry Art 6, in Arganda del Rey (Madrid), early and soon is already sitting in a ladder at the foot of what will be a bronze natural size of the great painter of the late 18th and early nineteenth century, commissioned by the City Council of Fuendetodos to preside over the great Goyesca party of the town, which is held in September.

The artist, at 89, is not yet fully satisfied with the provisional result and corrects the details with his collaborator Andrés García Ibáñez

In the workshop, two preparatory works for bronze coincide: the first is a digital impression made in 3 d, light and almost focused, except for the head of defined features; The second, made of polyurethane, a material as hard as wood, will serve to make the wax mold that will be used for the final foundry in bronze.

A Goya of about 190 cm, dressed as a courtiers, with the hair combed in a ponytail and the look in front, safe and determined. A figure with packaging and gallantry, which nevertheless does not convince Antonio López.

The head is not well placed -high, too advanced, wonders -and after much debate, López and sculptor Andrés García Ibáñez, who collaborates with the teacher for years, choose to remove it and re -assemble it again with a plasticine base that will allow them to move it slightly until the exact angle, one that shows decision but not superb.

“It is not the old Goya, nor the young Goya, is the Goya and an artist who has done an important job, who steps strongly, but is not pedantic, because he is intelligent. A Goya to which important things have already happened, which is already deaf. A Goya about 50 years,” López explains, while thoroughly sanding the edge of the levita of the sculpture.

In the workshop two works coincide: a 3D impression and a polyurethane statue that will serve to make the wax mold to melt the bronze

In his opinion, “the great Spanish artists were none pedantic, because Spain would not have allowed it. That could be the French, but not the Spaniards. Goya was an intelligent man who did a job for society, as any other worker could do.”

The body of the sculpture is based on that of the actor and singer Augusto González, of Music of Monuments, who plays Goya in the Goyescas days of Fuendetodos and who arrives at the Foundry accompanying the mayor of that town, Enrique Salueña, who has commissioned López this sculpture.

Salueña is responsible for putting outstands on the map with its impulse to the house-museum and the celebration of a conference in honor of the painter that all the years attract some 20,000 visitors to a town with 140 registered neighbors and in which only about 70 live.

With the arrival of the mayor, the conversation revolves where exactly the statue will be placed, at the gates of the home house and welcoming, and the convenience or not of resting in a base. López is clear: without a Peana, “that I step on.”

“The place where it will be is very familiar and elevate it to a base does not correspond to it: it has to be on the floor. It is in your town, at home, how are you going to put a base?” Argues the artist, willing to put a small base to give it greater stability, but burying it so that it is not seen.

In these appears the living Goya in the person of the actor, who dresses for the occasion and goes to approve the work and to thank López and García-Ibáñez for their work and dedication and give their opinion that yes, which must be on foot, welcoming visitors.

“It is not the old Goya, nor the young Goya, it is the Goya and an artist who has done an important job, who steps strongly, but is not pedantic”

Antonio López

The work, which López will be ready in about two months, “will spend summer in Fuendetodos, where it corresponds.”

The plan is that this sculpture was united by the house-museum another sculpture, also of López and García-Ibáñez, by Ignacio Zuloaga, the great Basque painter who, fascinated by Goya, was organized with other artists, intellectuals and patron of the 19th and early twentieth, to buy the home house in Fuendetodos and thus contribute to the memory of the Aragonese teacher.