Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting by Benjamin Fraser (review)

Rather than offer an artistic biography or an analysis of a single artist’s oeuvre, Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting embarks on a critical exploration of urban time and space. Fraser employs Antonio López García’s highly photographic representations of an ever-changing urban landscape as catalysts for moving his readers to reflect actively on their contemporary urban world, a journey that correctly poses more questions than answers. Although the book is directed both to general readers interested in art and to advanced students and scholars of urban culture, the former may become lost in the intentional meandering of Fraser’s intricate interdisciplinary approach. That said, the work nicely grounds each chapter with a treasure trove of critical notes and useful bibliography. It thus serves as a foundational point of entry into concerns that are at once cultural, literary, geographical, sociological, political, historical and urban (108).

In each chapter, Fraser launches from an analysis of one of López’s major paintings to consider a range of relationships and themes. Chapter 1, “Gran Vía,” offers a convincing argument of how López’s representation of Madrid’s famous street functions as a “hinge image,” one that enables the viewer to assess Madrid’s urban evolution dating back as early as the mid-nineteenth century. Here Fraser’s discussion of the ground level, personal vantage point of the city’s central thoroughfare—arguably the symbol of modern Madrid—skillfully explores the painting as an “urban portrait” of a single subject, a street that has borne witness to a multitude of social and political changes and that has been reborn and refashioned in a range of filmic and literary works. He clearly justifies the Gran Vía as a verisimilar palimpsest that “reasserts the value of an individual’s experience of the modern city” through time (26).

The painting at the heart of Chapter 2, “Madrid desde Torres Blancas” moves the reader from the ground to an aerial view, from an isolated intersection to a sweeping panorama of the city. In this way, Fraser’s choice of painting shifts the focus from the “lived city” to the “conceived city” (48). Unfortunately, the black and white reprinted image pales in comparison to the artist’s colorful, large format, hyperreal original. As with the other two paintings reproduced in the book, readers must look elsewhere to find an appropriate visual reference for the detailed descriptions Fraser offers throughout his analysis. Nonetheless, Fraser’s argument illuminates the connection between López’s choice of subject and the Francoist state’s postwar urban planning tradition in the 1960s and 1970s, a tradition Fraser understands to be a partnership between the Francoist government and capitalist speculation. Here he quite convincingly elucidates a link between the painting and the existence of an urban community that, while not homogeneous, has shared and continues to share a past and future.

Chapter 3, “Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas,” continues the move out and away from the city center, thus permitting readers to comprehend three horizontal dimensions of the painted urban landscape: biographical, visual, and sociopolitical. By selecting a painting of the Vallecas community, located at the outskirts of the city, Fraser situates readers at Madrid’s periphery and shows how the painting provides a perspective of an area that has traditionally been inhabited and reinvented by internal immigrants and other socially, politically and economically marginalized groups. After exploring its biographical roots as the home to the Madrid Realist movement, of which López was believed to be the pillar, Fraser then explains the painting’s focal point to be the “perfect liminal location” through which to speak of reconciling rural and urban space. Lastly, and perhaps most effectively, Fraser depicts the Vallecas community as a model of identity and self-expression: one that transformed from a...