The Spanish artist Antonio López García is revered worldwide not only for the extreme realism he brings to his paintings and drawings, but because he conveys through this extreme realism a wonderful sensitivity to light, color and space, enabling each to breathe with a tranquility that allows for the encroachments of everyday life. Interior scenes of dining tables, bathroom sinks, toilets, dressers are depicted in sober light that recall Chardin or the intimisme of Vuillard--though López García surpasses even these masters in his ability to make unforgivingly prosaic subject matter, such as a brick wall or a refrigerator, sparkle and throb with mood. The artist's statement that "you work until the whole surface has an expressive intensity equivalent to what you have before you, converted into a pictorial reality" conveys something of the labor he brings to his works: