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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.