Quince Tree of the Sun

Every year at the beginning of autumn, the sun shines for a scant two hours onto the quince tree in the garden of the studio of Madrid-based artist Antonio López Garcia. Every year, he tries to capture the majestic light in a painting. Victor Erice painstakingly films the painting process, and the similarities between the disciplines of the two men – painting and filming – become increasingly clear. From the moment López Garcia nails the canvas to the stretcher and bangs two metal pegs into the ground for his feet (to fix his position behind the canvas), a game of observation and staging starts, played out by extremely subtle means. What seems at first to be a recording of reality (painting the tree, filming the painting process), turns out to be a sophisticated composition. "What we have here is the perfect unity of emotion and order," someone comments on the paintings, and the same could be said of the film. Time keeps passing: as December looms, the quinces have changed shape too much to be reliable models, and the painter has to stop work.