The Truth in the Details

By ROBERT HUGHES

There are some artists whose work compels assent almost as soon as you see it. Its seriousness announces itself in precision, gravity, lack of obvious fluidity; in a fastidiousness that could be modesty but is in fact the only kind of aesthetic pride that matters and lasts; in a respect for the eye's power to surprise the mind, refracted through an intense engagement with tradition. Everything, in short, that is denied by the tyranny of the neo.

One of the few living painters of whom this seems to be true is Antonio Lopez Garcia, whose paintings, drawings and sculpture are currently on view at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. At 50, Lopez bears a large reputation in his native Spain and has become (no avoiding the term) a cult figure among younger Madrid painters. In New York, whose sense of current European art can be irritatingly provincial, he is scarcely known at all. The main reason for this--apart from the difficulty some people have in judging serious figurative painting and distinguishing it from common illustration--is that Lopez works with fanatical slowness, so his total oeuvre is small. He has had only nine one-man shows in his life, and the last one in New York was in 1968. It is unlikely that a better chance to see a quantity of his work together will come up soon.

The flavor of Lopez's art is peculiar and difficult to describe in the abstract. A good starting point is his small still life of a rabbit on a plate, dated 1972. It is just that, and no more: a rabbit skinned for roasting by a Spanish butcher, with its head left on; a glass plate with a scalloped edge; a kitchen table of pine covered with old cream paint, now scarred and stained, with bits of dark wood showing through; a band of gray wall with a mauve undercast. The table occupies a little over two-thirds of the depth of the painting, the wall the rest, and the corpse is huddled not quite in the center of the table. These slight departures from absolute regularity give the centered, single image a murmur, no more, of instability. The scheme is one of the most widely known in Spanish painting: the tradition of the bodegon, or kitchen still life, the isolated object against a plain field, brought to its fullest intensity by Zurbaran and Sanchez Cotan in the early 17th century. Echoes of the bodegones continued in Spanish art for hundreds of years; they could still be seen in Picasso's cubist still lifes. But Lopez's skinned rabbit goes straight back to the source, taking in a vivid memory of Goya's still lifes along the way.

The blond tonalities of the painting, its neutral, high and even light, are freighted with death. One realizes, subliminally at first, the likeness between the naked rabbit in a puddle of watery pink fluid on the plate and a fetus curled in its amniotic sac. But in a more general way, the pinkness of the rabbit is the rosiness of human nudity, and Lopez sets down every detail of it with an exact balance between detachment and anxiety. Nothing that can be seen is skimped--not even the freezer burns on the meat (which, Lopez explains, thawed and had to be refrozen dozens of times over the months of painting it) or the frosty, glaucous eye, staring at nothing. It is still life in the non-English sense, nature morte, "dead nature." In the hands of a melodramatic or cheaply "humanistic" artist, this rabbit would have been a pretext for the pathetic fallacy. But in Lopez's hands its death is its own and no one else's; and its minutely observant reconstruction under the brush, each nuance of its shrunken flesh reconstituted by a mark, fleck or scribble of paint that carries its wiry vitality as a sign, gives the inspection of this still and single object the power of narrative.

Lopez's art is not just about appearance. Its essential subject is time--how to use it, how to slow its passage, how to testify about a fugitive world that changes as he looks. The impressionist view--a motif, or the approximation of one, seen and completed in a few hours--is not for Lopez. His paintings come out of the most patient scrutiny in contemporary art. The panoramic view of downtown Madrid that is the show's centerpiece took eight years to finish, from 1974 to 1982. Muted and austere, almost palpably grimy and smoggy, it sets forth miles of the dull high-rise architecture of Franco's economic boom with a dedication to truth that surpasses Canaletto's.

He is a singular draftsman. Lopez's pencil drawings, both tiny and enormous --Water Closet, 1970-73, is 8 ft. high--display a command over the medium unique in 20th century realism. Who else has achieved such finesse of tone, such a steely grasp of hallucinatory detail within the ordinary, such a disdain for visual clutter? At their best, the drawings are a mesmerizing conjunction of opposites. On one hand, the patient surface, rubbed and reworked to a silvery bloom punctuated with dark points of attention, anxiously tender and very seductive to the eye; on the other, a kind of silent rawness, a persistent undercurrent of anguish about the worth of what can be seen. It is the very reverse of academic art and the antithesis of illustration.

So far, Lopez's sculpture (with the exception of a remarkable pair of naked figures of a man and a woman, life-size and carved in painted wood) does not match the intensity of his drawing or painting, perhaps because in bronze the pictorial illusions are too literal and their mystery drains away. Too often his work seems like a nostalgic recapitulation of Italian quattrocento sculpture, Desiderio da Settignano in particular. But of his power over the flat surface, there is no doubt. What we see there, in midcareer and at the height of his powers, is the greatest realist artist alive.