The subject comes wrapped in clouds of nostalgia, a longing for a lost and idealised simplicity. The real challenge is to paint the very strangeness of being a child: a state of private mythology, where the world is malleable and the most intense relationships are the ones invented in secret. A child's mind does not obey the rules of plausible company. It can befriend a shadow, a monster, or an animal.
This is the silent and unsettling space that Juanma Moreno Sánchez's watercolour, A friend, occupies. The title proclaims a simple companionship, but the image shows us an impossible one. The work is an early one, from 2010, but it already shows his interest in the seams of reality. The friendship we see here is no less strange than the hybrid creatures of his later work.
There is a tradition of portraying children with their animals, and it is rarely a simple record of affection. The animals act as symbols or as sources of a quiet tension. In Francisco de Goya's portrait of Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga, the boy, in his bright red suit, is flanked by caged goldfinches, symbols of innocence, while the family's cats lurk in the shadows with their eyes fixed on the birds. Goya paints a child's world surrounded by a world of predators, both in a fragile, temporary truce. The unease in Moreno Sánchez's painting is of another kind. The anteater is not a predator. The anteater is an animal so profoundly alien that the girl’s calm, possessive touch on its back seems like a category error, a gesture of domestication applied to something untameable.
This preoccupation with precarious, imagined, or failed connections is a recurring theme in Moreno Sánchez’s work from this period. It appears in the crowds of disconnected figures in works like Transeúntes (2008), who share a street, but not a world. The same theme surfaces in the very title of Abrazo de dinosaurio, from 2013, which promises an intimacy as absurd as it is physically impossible. In Voyeur, painted the same year as A friend, he presents us with a figure whose only way to participate is to watch. Although the girl in this painting is not exactly a voyeur of her own life, she is the only spectator of the scene she has constructed.
The handling of the watercolour is crucial, creating a world that seems more invoked than built. Another painter would have given the park more substance to anchor the strange pair in a solid, verifiable place. The lightness of the surroundings reinforces the idea that the scene is not happening entirely in the world, but in the girl’s head.
The final, unresolved question lies in the girl’s hand. It rests on the animal’s coarse fur, a point of contact between two different orders of being. But it is a tentative touch. It is not a caress or a pat; it is simply there, resting.
