When Julio Vaquero (Barcelona, ??1958) entered the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona as a student in the mid-seventies of the last century, he experienced a “terrifying” episode. His classmates slashed the figurative paintings of the many Catalan painters who populated the hallways. The war between the supposed “moderns” and the reviled “ancients” reached levels of maximum virulence and he, who had chosen to work from reality, suddenly found himself on the side of the defeated, those who would have to navigate the margins. of the space where contemporary art happens.
“That is something that has accompanied me all my life, since I can remember, as a woman who has to constantly prove that she is a virgin or what do I know,” says Antonio López (Tomelloso, 1936), the great master of Spanish realism. , for whom the old debate between figuration and abstraction is outdated, he says, and adds that no matter how much realist painting continues to be belittled in museums, “here I am. I have made a living from painting, I have exhibited in many parts of the world, they have bought me and there are people who like what I do, who defend it, who support it… There is no exaggeration. This is not a political creed that says if they catch me, they will lock me up or make me disappear. No, that’s not it either. The line of realism in the West has never disappeared and that is very important to take into account.”
The recent opening of the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Realism in Almería, the first and only monographic museum at the state level, and the confluence of a series of exhibitions (Beyond realism. Figurative art from China and Spain, in the Royal Palace; Isabel Quintanilla at the Thyssen; the anthology that Antonio López himself starred in in Barcelona and with which he settled a historical debt…), could lead one to think that realist figuration is back. That painting that for so long has been seen in avant-garde circles as old-fashioned or simply reactionary, an exclusive domain of old-fashioned people, is acquiring a new prestige and visibility in the art scene. “I don’t think so, maybe this week or this month that will be the case, but we are more or less in the same place of darkness,” López says.
“I think that many prejudices have been overcome and today they are looked at again without the dark circles of the controversies of the past, but there is still much to do,” considers Guillermo Solana, who from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, of which he is director, has promoted important exhibitions dedicated to North American hyperrealism, to Richard Estes, the Madrid Realists, monographs by Antonio López, another by María Moreno in the portfolio, the current one by Isabel Quintanilla or the one recently consecrated in collaboration with the National Gallery in London to Lucien Freud. An incontestable artist who, he remembers, until the 1980s was still labeled as a reactionary and was only allowed to enter art history through the side door. “I think that even in the nineties, on the occasion of an exhibition in Paris, Philippe Dagen, the critic of Le Monde called him ‘pompier couperose’, that is, a kitsch artist and linked his work to couperosis, the disease of the skin. And yet today no one doubts that he is a formidable painter, of enormous originality, one of the greatest of the late 20th century.”
“I don’t know if Andrew Wyeth or Edward Hopper had difficulties in America, but they are there. There are many spaces for art apart from the official one. And? “Nothing’s wrong,” says Antonio López, calmed by the years and apparently oblivious to the controversy that confronted him at the Reina Sofía in 1993, when for months he refused to exhibit in the museum until realist painters were included in the list. permanent collection of the center. “It seems very good to me that bad realism is not exhibited, which there is, and in fact I often find myself involved in exhibitions of realists with painters that I don’t like at all, but I don’t understand that dogmatism, that castration that leaves out everything that does not have to do with abstraction, with material informalism, with conceptualism… especially here, in Catalonia, where what persists is the lack of judgment, the ignorance that does not distinguish between the work of some painters of profession, some of them worthy, others less so, with others who, based on realism, open the door to another place and make an extraordinary contribution,” laments Vaquero.
Because the realist movement is not homogeneous either in its style, nor in its methods, nor in its ideology. Despite his commitment to figuration and the representative function of art, his objectives and perspectives diverge greatly. It can be difficult to find originality and significance, but no more so than in other areas. It also has nothing to do with photorealism. What would be the point of Antonio López going every summer to paint Puerta del Sol, investing hours and effort, if the same thing could be achieved with a photograph?
Vaquero, who in addition to being a painter and artistic advisor to the Sorigué Foundation, is often invited to give lectures on figurative art, believes that this condemnation to wander along the shores has not been suffered by, for example, American painters, where Richard Estes lives in the MoMA with Rothko without problems. That does not happen here, despite initiatives such as the exhibitions Avant-garde Realism or Realism in Catalonia which, curated by Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, contributed to making the dimension of the phenomenon visible in the 1990s.
There is no single cause but many factors come together, says Vaquero. One of them, and not the least, is that galleries, from a commercial point of view, are more interested in “having energetic artists who produce a lot and can supply a wide demand that they themselves are in charge of creating, than with painters who work at starting from nature with meticulous slowness.” But also, from the buyer’s point of view, “art that has a lot of personality, a Lucien Freud, for example, when you have it close it falls on you, overpowers you, pushes you, moves you. It is much easier to live with a Pollock.” And yet: “there is a curious phenomenon whereby anything other than creating something new has no right to life. As if we were not contemporaries.”
“Entry into contemporary art museums will perhaps come through the content, through what the images say, as has happened with Paula Rego, a figurative artist with an open tomb, who speaks of social realities that connect her with the world today,” Solana senses. The painter Josep Segú (Salomó, 1958), author of essays such as El nou realisme a Catalunya i al món or Pintar la realitat, nevertheless believes that, although with much delay, “realism is coming out of the shadows because official art, The avant-garde is at a dead end and people are looking at reality again, at what they have around them. But, come on, I don’t think it’s going to become a hegemonic movement by any means,” he clarifies, and observes a new generation of artists “who use figuration no longer to observe the world but to tell their own, personal stories.” “I will try not to be a bitter old man,” he concludes, “but the truth is that consideration for the type of painting I do is zero,” despite the success of his current exhibition at the Sala Parés, Tots els mecanismes, which has barely achieved any impact. media.
While the museum in Almería was opening, the closure of the Marlborough gallery was announced, which has left an entire generation of Spanish realists orphaned, including Antonio López, who has given the Andalusian center nearly 60 pieces, including his own, his wife, María Moreno, and Francisco López. Also, to mark the limits between one another, works by Gordillo, Lucio Muñoz and Joaquín Ramo, abstract painters who are part of his personal collection.
