“Being old has made me freer,” says Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936), who at 87 years old opens this Friday in La Pedrera what will be his first major monographic exhibition in Barcelona, a journey through seventy years of creation with the that the master of Spanish realism, Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts and Velázquez Prize for the plastic arts, disembarks in a city that last winter began to paint from the sky of the MNAC and Park Güell. In the hours before the doors open, the artist moves lightly through the eighty works that make up the exhibition, answers the questions without skirting any issue and chooses to take a photograph next to a self-portrait made from a photograph of him from when he was six months.
We must take courage in the 21st century to continue going out to paint from life and stand with our easel and paint box surrounded by curious onlookers. What does the street give you?
Going outside not only helps me paint that place, with its light, with its sounds. The life of the painter is a life in solitude. I have spent hours making drawings in my studio, alone, for hours and hours, days and days, entire weeks... So, from time to time I like to go out into the world, because I like the world, I like the people. . I need it.
Going out also means putting yourself out in the open.
Sometimes I get lazy about many of the things I have to do. When I go out into the world, well, I have to go out, but I always come back with a gift. It's not that that happens to me, it's that I find that. A face that I liked, some words that were said to me, a gesture that reached me. Apart from that, it is true that there are impertinent and annoying people, and I undoubtedly notice it, I feel it, but above all that there is something that I like.
Why isn't photography useful?
There is a lot of painting that is made from photography, it uses it. But I need the natural, the precision of the tone, the precision of the light, the temperature. You only get all of that when you are in the place. Seeing how the sun, the light, changes, is a very vivid thing.
Can't that attempt to stop time be maddening?
It has always been like this. Corot, who was one of the first to paint directly from a landscape in the mid-19th century, knew that if he chooses the morning to paint, because he likes morning light better, in the afternoon he will have to stop. The sun limits you, you can't paint for more than three hours at a time. But that's not crazy, you learn as you go. My uncle Antonio López Torres, who taught me how to paint and was the only painter I knew until he came to Madrid, already did it this way and in turn had inherited it from other painters. Plein air painting has regulations, like doing a child or eating. You learn it, like perspective, which was a mystery until someone figured out the rules.
Where have you found more mystery, in life or in art?
I think that the mystery of life is an unfathomable mystery. In art, everyone does what they can to catch it. If not, it is somewhat uninhabited. What inhabits it, what makes it great in the moments when art is great, which is not always achieved, because it is precisely that mystery, that emotion that you have felt and that you transfer there.
He says that people like him a lot, but his cities are depopulated.
Let's say I like it, I don't know if it's very much. Now I'm with you and I like it, I like your face. I always find things that contribute to me. But my cities are empty because people move. Clouds, cars, people are left out for that reason. I work on the permanent, which is already a lot. There are people in Canaletto's paintings, you never see empty Venice. As I would do it? Well, I do not know. Photography did not exist then. I have accepted what the picture is like when I work exclusively on what is permanent and leave out everything that has mobility. It's like a photograph, those old photographs, which needed a five-minute exposure and the people can hardly be seen, they are shadows. Well, the painting is like an exhibition of months. Everything that moves disappears, it is not there.
Portraying your studio, your family, everything that surrounds you over and over again, is it an attempt to retain your world?
From very early on I have worked on a series of topics. One of them is the place where I make my life. It could be the city, it could be the rooms. In this exhibition there are two cores, the works that I did in the sixties and the last things, in which I returned to the rooms already painted, but to which I incorporated my family.
Does interest in what has already been seen never fade?
You might wonder why Morandi, an extreme case, does not tire of always painting the same still life, the same objects, for years. I, compared to Morandi, am of truly tremendous variety. Here you can see. There is the city, there are the people, dressed, naked, the children, the flowers, the trees. We all have a limit, just like our relationships with people. When you reach that limit, it's over. In the case, for example, of the drawings I made in the sixties, I finished the last one without knowing it was the last one. I wanted to continue making them because it seemed to me that it provided something beautiful, interesting and new. But something was spent. Something happened to me. I got saturated. You live that. And it's like you get tired of a person. You don't want to see her anymore. So, that spell, that infatuation, if it evaporates, you are left without it. And, well, our work is saved because it is done in freedom. There is no order, there is nothing more than your own inner impulse that takes you things. If that weakens, you have no choice but to stop. And then you can find other similar spaces, nearby. Is the world. The world can be many things. Here, there is a lot of variety.
And you who portray the world, what would you change about it?
Well look, the first thing I would change would be the politicians and immediately after the educators. If these two do it well, all the social injustice, all the excesses would end, the cities would not be so big, we would be more sensitive to nature and we would not use things for our benefit. Now we are many. Humanity has grown in a terrible way. We have many needs and we are going to end everything. It seems horrible to me. I pick up the newspaper and see that there is a type of Tasmanian tiger that no longer exists and I think it is a disgrace. There has been an obsession with God in man. Our God told us grow, multiply and the world is at your service. That cannot be so, because man already has excessive power over nature, which is the greatest of all.
What keeps you awake?
I sleep very well. It's my salvation. I don't feel like eating. I might not eat. But sleeping saves me. I had a season of unexpected insomnia and I was very scared, I was really scared. I went to a place in Granada where the phenomenon of sleep was studied. It's tremendous because sleeping does not depend on your will. You enter the dream as if by miracle and I find it amazing. I get scared when someone close to me tells me that he hasn't been able to sleep. In other times it would be not being able to eat. When you read Spanish literature from the 17th century, the problems are with food. Now it is the state of mind that leads you to sleep well or badly.
Not even a controversy like the one aroused by his project for the doors of the Burgos Cathedral, in which UNESCO has even spoken out against it and whose budget amounts to 1.2 million euros?
No, they don't keep me up at night.
Does criticism affect you?
Yes, of course, both what the person most involved in the art world says and what anyone passing by on the street says. But that should not be an impediment for me to do what I have to do. Burgos has to move forward because the work has been paid
But would you let him run for you?
No. It is my first work on a religious topic. Everything in this exhibition, practically everything, has been because I wanted to do it. The artist's work, since the Impressionists, has been done outside of the commission. That is why he has acted with so much freedom and has been able to enter areas that were not possible before. In this case someone ordered those doors from me. At that time I was very interested in working on the religious theme, to see how I could do it, and I am doing it with a group of people. The Cathedral of Burgos is protected by UNESCO and a series of people who you neither know nor who they are, but with a lot of power, decided that my doors should not be there. Well, if that can't happen, it won't happen. No problem.
He is not the first artist to stumble.
When you know a little about what has happened since the Renaissance, you realize that man can always create something dissonant in relation to what is expected of him. Michelangelo was almost thrown down because of his Last Judgment, in which all the characters were naked and that seemed impossible in the Sistine Chapel. Caravaggio had several paintings rejected. Little by little the Church has become very distant from us, more than we are from it. In this case it was she who approached me, not I her, and was deceived by her.
What does it mean?
Well, I deceive, without intending to. There is in me a will to reach a bottom that I don't know what it will be and that perhaps for the person who commissioned it may be unbearable, that she may not be able to accept it. Because he saw my flowers, he saw landscapes of Madrid, he saw portraits, and they disoriented him... But the doors are made with great respect. When all this came up they called me to talk, but I have never wanted to do it. It is a story that has been repeated a lot and when it's your turn, well, you put up with it. And, I insist, since I have been paid, I have to finish it. That's it. It is a job that has given me a lot because I had never represented God, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, and then because it has given me the experience, which for me is very important, which is that of collective work. That is an experience that is very important to me because at this time our work is extremely individual. In the 12th century Rubens would have a battalion there, or Raphael, all those painters. Imagine the number of people who must have worked on the decoration of the Parthenon. But our work, since the impressionists, is an absolutely individual work. And I really liked recovering that way of working.
Have you never stopped believing in yourself?
I think I have achieved a lot, I have managed to live from my work, and live well. I know there are people who find my work helpful, they like it, to me that already seems like a lot. How far do you have to go? Do you have to conquer absolutely everything? Logically not. I accept the limits. If I can't go to the Venice Biennale, I won't go to Venice. And if I can't be in the Reina Sofía, I'm not in the Reina Sofía. I'm here. Of course when they hung me at the Reina Sofía I liked it and when they didn't hang me I was upset. But that can't stop you. Because there will always be people who don't accept you. Think of who you think of.
He said he cheated a lot, who really is Antonio López?
Well, I think that everything is here in La Pedrera. Just walk through it and look at it. My painting is very explicit. Here are my ideas, my loves, my limits, they are all there. And you can see it.
There is also a recent and unknown Antonio López, the one of the naked man with an erect penis who grabs a woman by the neck.
In the movies, in shows right now, we see tremendous things and yet nothing happens. It's actually a love scene. But she is the one who is bewitched, he is not bewitched. And then that anomaly, let's say, that dysfunction creates a big, very deep conflict there.
Has your life changed much since the death of your wife [also a painter María Moreno, who died in 2020]?
It has changed a lot, yes. What happened is that María left little by little. Her illness lasted 14 years, perhaps longer. And she went away, she went away, she went away, she went away, until she was very far away. She was there but a very important part was no longer with us. And I miss her, of course.
Does getting old have good things?
Of course, yes, very good. The worst thing is that your back hurts or that you have a prostate. You see the life of Michelangelo and the poor man couldn't urinate and that was horrible, but now they cure that. You have cataracts and you have them operated on... Not other things, of course. But I'm very well.
I asked him about the profits.
You feel freer. I talk about things now and I can now do things that I couldn't do before. I was able to do it when I was very young. When I was very young I acted with a lot of freedom, because I was starting something and I didn't know it yet. Then there was an innocence that made me free. And now knowledge has made me freer. I can tell you whatever it takes, to whoever, and nothing happens, or it does happen, but let it happen. So that freedom, that vision of the old man, I am 87 years old, has made me, for example, find beauty in the destruction of flowers. It never crossed my mind that a dying flower could have enormous beauty. And then there is the understanding of others. Now I understand others better.
Are you afraid of death?
It's just that I don't think about it, I don't feel it. I do feel that threat in the people I love, but that has always happened to me. But mine, if it is hidden behind that column, well I don't perceive it. It's like I'm never going to die.
And the fact that strength, ability, dexterity fail? Does painting with pain modify the result of the work?
Do you know what could change? That you will fall out of love with what moves you to work. It's like you fall out of love with a person you no longer like. That you will get tired.
That's not likely to happen to you, is it?
At the moment it doesn't happen to me. My hands are deformed but I can hold the brush perfectly, it doesn't hurt, I'm very lucky, because I'm a healthy old man. Medicine can do many things for you except make you lose your enthusiasm for something, your desire to do something from something you see and that seduces you. That is something truly miraculous. It is a natural fact when it occurs in a natural way but when it is over it is over. And there are poets who have stopped writing poems and actresses who have stopped representing. When Anna Magnani filmed The Golden Carriage with Jean Renoir, the painter's son, she arrived at the shoots dead of sleep and with terrible dark circles under her eyes after going out to the bars every night. She said she couldn't work. Renoir didn't say anything and placed the spotlights to hide his appearance. But no matter how subtly those around you treat you, maybe you can't do it anymore. So yes, it is the death of your job.
Isn't it difficult for you to get out of bed?
It costs me a lot. I always get up at the same time, at eight fifteen, I don't need an alarm clock, I'm already awake, I remove the sheet or blanket and lie down on the floor. And in that moment all the dark things in my life come before me. I step on the floor, walk to the bathroom, brush my teeth and I notice that I am getting better by the minute. And I'm starting to think that I have to paint something or go to the foundry, but there is something biological about the beginning of the day that has been very difficult for me for ten or fifteen years. Everything happens for a reason and in my case I think it's because I'm old and the task overwhelms me. I can't do what I did before, I need constant help.
Last year he began painting for the first time two views of Barcelona from the MNAC and Park Güell. What does the city look like from there?
I painted first Tomelloso and then Madrid, which are two places that offer me what they have, what I see. And I do it with great pleasure, I never get tired of it. Then I have traveled and seen places that I found interesting, Barcelona, Seville, Bilbao... but I don't live there and so you have to go look for the appropriate places, you can't find them. Where do you paint it from? Barcelona from the MNAC is a dazzling spectacle, with the winter sun beating down on the city in front of you. And then I started another one from the opposite side, towards the sea, installed on the terrace of a house in Park Guëll whose owners I asked permission.
What other jobs do you have going on?
A lot! For example, I have to make a crucified Christ. It turns out that now they entrust me with religious things. And I accept them. The Christ is for the New Cathedral of Vitoria. The crucified one is in our history from the moment we are born. It is a very old topic. It is two thousand years old and has been painted in many ways.
What will yours be like?
Well, I will do the crucified one from my feelings. I want to contribute something. I am not going to base myself on a medieval crucifix, nor on one by Michelangelo or Martínez Montañés. I want to make my Christ, who is a man and that is why he dies. And at the same time he is an invention of man. I was born in the year 36 in a town and I experienced religion very closely when beliefs were very alive.
Are you a believer?
No, not like before. But what has led to the creation of religion is in our hearts and in our psychological need. So, you always have things left and you work with that.
