An angel's wing is not an instrument for flying, but a problem of weight, texture, and light. It is an object that has to be represented, a handsome piece of theatrical staging. The work happens in the gap between the magnificent name and the mundane thing.
This is the space Juanma Moreno Sánchez occupies in Ángel I. The painting lays out the components of a celestial being. The title promises divinity, but the canvas delivers an inventory. Here, a wing, smooth and white, leaning against a body as though waiting to be fitted. Here, a torso, rendered with the anonymous, functional smoothness of a mannequin. Here, a bolt of bright blue cloth, crumpled on the floor like a dropped costume. The figure's arms rise in a gesture that could be ecstasy or surrender, but without a face it is merely a pose. The painting is an anatomy of an icon, the systematic dismantling of a sacred image into its constituent parts.
This analytical coolness marks a turn in his work. A decade earlier, in a small watercolour like “Paisaje con ángeles” from 2010, the divine arrived quietly, a hinted halo in a public park. The angelic was a possibility you could almost miss. More recently, in paintings derived from generative systems like “Catástrofe en el bosque” from 2024, the supernatural bursts out as body horror, a monstrous fusion of flesh and landscape. Ángel I, along with its companions in the series, offers a third way. It neither hints nor distorts: it dissects. The strangeness does not come from a glitch in the code, but from the calm, methodical way a being of pure spirit is treated as something assembled out of stage props.
The painting reaches back to a history much older than the studio. It reads like an inversion of the ex-voto, those offerings traditionally left in Spanish churches. Those small paintings or metal plaques, often roughly made, depict a single body part, a leg or an eye, offered in gratitude for a miracle. They are fragments of the profane given over to the sacred. Moreno Sánchez gives us the sacred in fragments. The wing, the body, the cloth: they are like relics stripped of their story, presented not for veneration, but for inspection. The tradition of the Spanish ex-voto is one of desperate, concrete faith; this painting feels like an act of cataloguing.