Atocha 1964

Antonio Lopez Garcia’s ‘Atocha’ is a painting made with a gentle palette of grey and earth tones that feels both incredibly real and dreamlike at once. I can only imagine Lopez Garcia standing in the middle of a busy Madrid street, trying to capture the light, the buildings, and the way the city breathes. It's like he’s wrestling with the real, trying to pin down the ephemeral. The texture looks thick, built up, and labored over. There's a real sense of struggle and searching. What’s more, there is a striking contrast between the urban landscape and the intimate figures in the foreground. It makes me think about artists like Lucian Freud and his unflinching gaze, but here, there’s also something so tender and melancholy. I feel like I'm in conversation with other painters across time, all of us trying to figure out how to make sense of life through this messy, beautiful medium.