"If I had to specify the first stimuli that arouse my interest by placing two or more people together in the same space painting or sculpture, I refer first to the exercises I did in art class during my senior year at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid (1953-54), where students were working on a composition by a figure articulated human dummy.
In that course the figure used was always a naked woman, and the contrast was between her and the same size mannequin dressed, his head painted or glass eyes, was surprising.
By then I had among my things a picture of my grandparents that I looked beautiful for what it represented and gave me the impression that the combination of the frontal figures of those two people who had known and older.
I looked the picture and had so much presence that it was as if my grandparents will accompany me in that rented room. I wanted to paint, but during those early years had always worked from life and he doubted that little black and white photography to give me the information needed to make a painting.
Despite my hesitation, the summer of 1955, finishing the studies already Tomelloso painting and I started to paint about natural size, and I did a flip, with great enthusiasm, trying to decipher through the language of painting the character of these two people: the head, so unlike the character of each expressed by the light and shadows, the two mouths, two noses, eyes, trim neck on the shoulders. together was exciting, looking at the viewer with the same attitude, with much in common and yet so different. At the same time working on two or three paintings are also two grouped figures, but they were generic figures, and was a few months later, 55 to 56, when turned on the double portrait: my paternal grandparents in a wedding portrait and my parents painted from life. Already at that time so I sensed both confusing and intense, as always perceive these things, the discovery of this form of group two human beings.
I knew, mostly through books and reproductions, this form of representation in a flash appeared on the art of sculpture and painting: the Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck, a painting I saw at that time in Naples, couples sitting sculptures of Egyptian art ... These images helped to define and specify the subject.
In those years I kept painting and drawing groups of figures (four women, one married couple ...), always dressed in close to real size. About 1961, I thought how interesting that the couple could be stripped. At first I wanted to paint, and did some drawings of natural size, but the adventure was stopped here because I found models to my liking and thought it could not continue without a concrete man and a woman as a starting point. He still had the desire to make a couple of nudes.
After a few years relief modeling, having done some set free, I decided to sculpture to realize the naked, thinking that the sculptural form in a sense, I would allow greater processing capacity than paint. Locate a male model in the former School of Fine Arts, where I was teaching, and a female model in the Fine Arts. At the end of 1965 the group started to work without imagining the journey so labyrinthine complicated and time starting at the time. With the hopes of those years felt urge to see the two figures standing and started mounting them on wax from natural vacuum I did on the two models. And so far it seemed extraordinary to see them materialized. From that moment I started working on the figures, to shape, to change parts of them that did not fully satisfy me. Despite the mismatch of motion or proportion seemed interesting.
During my second exhibition in New York in 1968, I thought I had to show them and the wood. When I saw so without the charm of the surface of the wax, I seemed rude and elementary, but believed in the figures and I decided to develop them and in this new material. After working a season in them, increasing disorientation, the left until 1973, when he was preparing a statement of realism in the Marlborough Gallery in London, decided to continue to display there. Since the beginning of that year I returned to work on them with the help of Francisco López.
Unlike marble or bronze, wood can remove, add or change the way very easily, and then work on the heads from new models. With these new models and other changes by the di completed and included in the sample, which were sold to an American collector. When I saw the group at the London exhibition, outside the studio at some distance from the struggle to end for the show, I had the impression that the figure of the man was a little monstrous, with arms too long, a little monkey, and I suggested to the gallery to propose to the owner of the sculptures that they return to Madrid to make some changes.
And here begins an adventure that has lasted until today, we can say, and that was to make real what was just in my mind, not the outside world at a time when the process my work was exactly the opposite: first came the subject and only then would begin the task of interpreting what aroused my attention to trying to represent it faithfully. Because it was so precisely because it exactly that way, so I was interested.
I cut the chest of the figure of man by the waist and held out. So I was narrow and widen. Bandy legs and I seemed gradually removing the interior and exterior gluing adding in sackcloth and adding a mixture of glue, plaster, wood flour and pigments. The head was finished and guided me to where to take the picture.
But what he did was never sure that was well resolved. Finding no single model that amounted to sculpture, working with several taking advantage of them is closer to what I thought it should be. He worked intermittently, when he saw quite clearly the way forward, amazed sometimes my forgetfulness. At some point I noticed that the figure was too rigid and that if he leaned on his right leg should also lean to the right, and that led me to new changes. He was still disoriented. Each new model marked a direction that I once managed something materialized yet created a new disorder. I decided to make drawings with measures of different people and see what were the constants in the basic proportions.
This task and sometimes seemingly endless obsession was a source of jokes or concern for those who saw me work without a definite direction. But he could not leave. And I have to say that in no time I weighed and considered useless or wasted time you spent. I accepted that it had to be. Occasionally thought should also continue the figure of the woman to incorporate the new man's character. But I always hoped to have resolved to see what those changes should be. By that time I had dreams which the figure of a man following me in the street. About the people, see rear its head. Also in the house I was still not exactly threatening attitude, but I was intimidated, as if I asked something not well understood. The figure has ended up being a compendium, a summary of many figures to be more or less chosen for me have ended up being a form of inner self. The character unit that originally had the men and women have gotten weak, as if the figure of women, completed year 73 before expressing a form of inhibition and fear, and the man had been recovering a space higher luminosity and nobility.
the end I think in my life with these two figures, the amount of time I have joined in the studio: about thirty-six. I also think it was worth all this adventure, so disproportionate, but not to repeat it. On the other hand, I believe it is sometimes the adventures in the world of art as well as irrational and uncomfortable, even with the risk of possibly imperfect solution. "
Antonio Lopez Garcia Madrid, September 2001
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