Antonio López: "I would return to paint the picture of the Royal Family, but not the same"

has just been inaugurated in

, despises this definition: "Art is not a horse race."

Are you happy with this retrospective that runs through your career from the 1950s to almost the last few months? Very happy, and more so that Mari is with me.

She is a great painter whom I met when we were studying.

A gorgeous girl.

We connected and we continued seeing each other until we already became boyfriends.

She then started teaching.

When we got married, she spent her time making a living teaching classes.

But we went on a honeymoon to Guardamar, in Alicante, and we spent a month painting the sea together.

I was so impressed that I told her to drop the class.

Do you think that being a woman harmed you in any way in your career as a painter? How is it going to harm you?

Now there are more women than men studying Fine Arts.

Man has it very difficult too.

Many do not move on because they do not deserve the support of society or because they are unlucky.

Tomás says that I have ambition.

She, none, always willing to give herself to things that for me were not compatible with the time I had to dedicate to painting.

With Mari, it seemed that life was more important than painting.

That made her freer than me.

But I was very supportive of her.

In the exhibition we can see her first work, from 1953. How would you say her evolution as a painter has been since then? She was 17 years old and very young, she knew less than now and was more spirited.

Youth has virtues in art and in life.

At different ages, you lose things and gain others.

However, my evolution has been from absolute ignorance.

When I was young, I thought that painting was just copying the real world.

And now at 84?

Over time you learn the secret of painting: there are ways to express yourself, all valid, but you have to find yours.

It takes you a lifetime, but it's nice to walk that path.

Talented people get lost along the way because they can't find their space.

The secret is to find your voice, although doubts never leave you.

Freedom can sometimes haunt you.

In what sense? Today we are free to do what we want.

In another time, the painter was kidnapped by the commission.

Now that doesn't happen, you can do whatever you want.

The painting 'The Family of Juan Carlos I', which took two decades to complete, is his most famous commission.

Would I do it again? Yes, I would paint the picture of the Royal Family again.

If the new kings commissioned me another painting, I would be delighted.

The king [emeritus] told me: "We are a Spanish family."

I knew there were more than that, but what he said helped me.

In fact, there are no scepters or crowns.

He is a father, a mother and their children.

They say of his painting that he strives to capture what remains and lasts, the essence of reality.

If you had to make that painting today, would it be the same?

Or would the scandals that have plagued the King Emeritus influence him in some way?

The same painting could not do it because I have aged.

I would paint it again, but not the same.

All the years that I have lived would influence me, not the events of the life of the Royal Family, which are not as important as they have been given.

What you have to do is respect art.

The painting of Juan Carlos I is where it should be.

Should The Family of Carlos IV be removed from the Prado Museum because there are some scoundrels?

Why don't we see the painting, the art?

Do you like street art? Graffiti?

Of course, like everything that man does naturally.

Graffiti is not an invention of now, there were already in Pompeii.

The common man had the intuition to express things in a simple way, with drawings that had to do with love, fear, sex, life ... That is why graffiti is as old as man, it is a language that begins with the man.

It stayed for a while in the gutter, forgotten, and now it is given more value.

I like it.

It has a lot of value because it is popular art.

A sensitive person can achieve interesting things that a professional cannot.

What do you think when you see that works of art are bought for millions of euros? If the millions of euros that a work of art may be worth are used to ensure that it is respected and not destroyed, that is fine to me. In your case, your work it talks about the closest experience, although it revolves around great themes such as the human body, the city or even the domestic interior.

It would seem that it is glued to reality.

What is it that attracts you so much about her?

Where are you going to get things if it is not your life?

The reality is our life.

Since the Altamira caves, painting has been nurtured from the real world.

I copy reality, but as a painter you must express a feeling and an emotion, something that is actually a mystery.

Without mystery, a painting that is a mere copy of reality has no value.

That's what photography is for, which better copies reality.

He says the confinement hasn't affected him much.

The man has lived more serious things.

This pandemic is nothing.

And in my work I have not noticed much.

No painter's life has changed, because our work is in solitude.

I do it with hardly any interaction with people.

But it is true that everything around me has changed.

What we have experienced is a threat to all of us as human beings.

We don't do things right.

Are you afraid? No, I'm not afraid.

I'm sorry that the people I love are dying.

The rest is life.

I like life and I am not afraid of life.

Not even death.

I don't think about her and maybe I'm unconscious.