Voices en Español

To all who are in the Northeastern U.S. or have summer vacation plans to visit Boston, there’s a massive art exhibit currently at the Museum of Fine Arts. First up is the exhibit “From El Greco to Velázquez: Art during the Reign of Phillip III.” But the current MFA Boston exhibition that caught my attention was the one for Antonio López García, who at least one art critic considers Spain’s greatest living painter. His paintings are so real and lifelike that they appear to be photographs.  López is reportedly such a stickler for detail that he can spend years completing a single work.  A painting he did of an open refrigerator took three years to finish. Now, at the age of 72, López is getting his first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

To tell you the truth, I had never heard of him before reading the Slate piece, but he sounds like a down-to-earth, passionate artist who isn’t  pretentious nor caught up in trying to impress art collectors, gallery owners and museum curators.

“Painting gives me the feeling of love,” he says in a Boston Globe profile. “It allows me to relate to my surroundings. Studio painting is very different from my way. There is that relation with the world, that Velázquez had, that is something wonderful and marvelous. To work as a painter is lonely but that takes you out into the world.

“No, for me,” he says, “the process is more important than finishing the work.”

Here’s an audio slideshow about Antonio López García and his art.