BOSTON

Antonio Garcia Lopez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

I went there, yesterday and went through the El Grecco exhibit in about 3 minutes. The downstairs exhibit featuring Mr. Lopez, however, was much more captivating. Not only a master of line, color, and materials, you look at the paintings, drawings, and sculpture of Mr. Lopez and know that he is looking very hard at every detail of his world. He is feeling the essence of every object, surface, and persceptive. At first I thought the exhibit was of Richard Estes' work, because of the realism, but actually Mr. Lopez doesn't go as far as Mr. Estes' to make things hyper real. In fact, while drawing a pumpkin patch from behind a screen door, he puts more weight into the pencil at the crossmarks of the screen. The pumpkins are knotty and huge, but the tiny "t" marks of the screen door give the drawing a pixelated effect. In addition, his painting "La cena" shifts in areas the way a digital image looks with glitches. Mr. Lopez's work not only masters color, tone, and line quality, but his subject choice and presentation will draw any viewer as close to each piece as the museum will allow them to be.