Antonio López: Trotter

« It is strange to think that nature, which can neither draw nor paint any likeness, sometimes creates the illusion of having done so, while art, which has always been successful at resemblances, renounces its traditional, almost inevitable and "natural" vocation and turns to the creation of such forms as nature itself abounds in-mute, unpremeditated, and without a model. This inversion in the order of things seems simultaneously to reveal and to conceal a problem.»

- Roger Caillois from The Writing of Stones (1985)

Antonio López's paintings appear to have fallen together the way a person falls from one state of consciousness and into another. They arrive tethered to a common gravity, although the heterogeneous articles that populate his paintings seem to relate only through an acclimation to their shared circumstance. They lay in a palindromic suspension without narrative conduits, as if in aspic. 

If there's any suggestion of narrative suspense embedded within these fields, it might be because we're conditioned to look for one wherever the ground hasn't been covered with salt. While López's paintings are stubborn in their refusal to tell stories, eschewing sentimental illustration in favor of pictures that act as transitional objects between accumulation and loss, they also comprehend the inevitability of a projective gaze, non-defensively. Furniture made of dislocated symbols, pigeons in abandoned office spaces, reproductive diagrams morphing into totemic heads, a tornado's aftermath… Extracting the works into this kind of descriptive language may feel embarrassing, impotent, even rude, but it also picks at threads that have been left exposed. The ambivalence of painting as a representational medium, which gives it its charge, lies between the desire to retain and a rejection of an illusion of retention.  

In many of these paintings, the contours signal roughly virtuosic registers of human or animal activity, fossils, a manga character, a bird, a fragment of a statue, architecture reclaimed by flora, piquing the anthropomorphic impulses of a viewer's eye. These outlines act as apertures, to see into and to see through, creating vertiginous inversions of rational space. The exposed wiring is a frenetic noise of overlap, redaction and abandoned graffiti; a ghostly, latent and rough grammar conducting modern and paleolithic currents. 

Where a Duchampian silhouette frames a subject's portrait through its negation, López utilizes silhouettes as territorial spaces, like chalk outlines of figures consumed by a pictorial infrastructure into which their disappearance acts as rebar. These voided spaces only negate the cosmetics of their legibility as signs, puncturing the field to allow the ground to bleed into them as forms. The silhouette is used as a way to excavate an alternate semblance of interiority rather than to revoke interiority. It's a utilization more attuned to the eye of a lapidary than that of a draftsman.

Occasionally, these overlays produce a gestalt apparition; a face emerges from the field even though one can clearly see that the constellation of shapes that produce this pareidolia belongs to disparate elements. These moments seem at peace sharing authorship with intersubjective cognition. This openness to the idea of painting as a framework for discovery is reminiscent of looking into the stains of cracked walls and finding pictures there. But just because one sees a face staring back at them from the painting once, doesn't necessarily mean that they will see it again. 

Attempting to describe one's dream before the memory of it fades, it quickly becomes apparent that the tendencies of speech produce another kind of image that's so indebted to its own logic, it can only betray the syntax that's native to dreams. The problem isn't that there aren't signs or words for the subjects that appear in dreams, but that in dreams the categories to which these subjects belong are flexible in a way that conventional language is not. When language tries to learn from and internalize these qualities, it appears as a radical act, poetry. In a painting or in anyone's dream, a mattress can easily transition into a stage or conform to the shadow of a cat.

James Krone