María Moreno, a simple light has gone out

The wonderful painter from Madrid, wife of the hyperrealist Antonio López, has died at the age of 87.

When talking about María Moreno, one has the sensation of entering a patio, not only because her own name invites one to do so, like that of those elderly ladies who have gathered the fruits of their garden all their lives, but because in his paintings one better understands the light that makes the most common places so special. Maybe Vermeer. Maybe Sorolla. But very few painters have known how to collect with a brush that minimal plasticity of the luminescence of things.

He was born in Madrid in 1933, although with the Civil War he would spend a few years in Valencia, where he discovered other colors and the sea. When she began her studies in Fine Arts in 1954, she herself knew that she had a lot to learn: she would visit Paris, give classes, and compile in her mind everything she wanted to do. When he finished his studies in 1959, the pictorial group was already formed: Isabel Quintanilla, Julio and Francisco López Hernández, Lucio Muñoz, Amalia Avia, Esperanza Parada and, of course, Antonio López.

Amalia married Lucio. Hope, with Julio. Elizabeth with Francis. And María Moreno, Mari, with Antonio, with whom she would have her two daughters, María and Carmen. “For us it has been much more difficult than for our husbands,” Quintanilla said on one occasion. For Moreno, especially, especially because, although she and her life partner were mutual supports and pedestals on which they settled, he was the great exponent of hyperrealism in Spain. And she, woman.

It must be added that his initial paintings were gloomy, dark, uncertain, as could be seen in his first exhibition, in 1966 at the Edurne Gallery. And that its production is not very wide. It will be in the 80s, once her career is much more consolidated, with exhibitions abroad and the influence of Antonio López Torres, her husband's uncle, when she finally opens up to the light, which will soak everything in her work.

From then on, the flowers will receive another glow, its white walls will be antonyms of the elusive, it will search the streets and the skies for the celestial capacity that they have hidden. “I would like to put in the frame everything I want to express and I cannot do it with words. I am more of a painter of light, of well-placed shapes. The light that I like to use is well suited to that fragile, weightless world that blends in with the atmosphere that surrounds it”. His words.

Her name is separated from that of her husband, being companions in adventures and their own entities, but each with their delicacy and candor. He praises Moreno that his painting "speaks of something, it refers to something that has a lot of value: purity, the purity of things, in an impure world." She is the executive producer of 'La luz del quince', the 1992 Víctor Érice film centered on Antonio López and in which she appears as a character herself. It will win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Valeriano Bozal, a renowned Spanish art historian, in his work Historia de la pintura y la escultura del siglo XX en España, made a conscientious definition of the difference between the realism of Moreno and the quasi-photography of Antonio López: "His affairs are very close to those of her husband: everyday scenes, plates of food, bedrooms, the backyard, etc.

"Her affairs are very close to her husband's: daily scenes, plates of food, bedrooms, the backyard, etc.

valerian muzzle

Solitude and silence also predominate, but in one aspect she differs from her husband: her gardens have flourished." It will be that light has given them.