To paint a carnival is usually to paint a crowd. The subject has been widely treated in art, from Bruegel to Ensor. They are often swarms of people: a city losing its mind, or a collective surrender to noise and costume. The carnival is an escape valve, a sanctioned disturbance where the self temporarily dissolves into a larger, chaotic whole. A carnival of three, therefore, is a contradiction. It takes the public ritual and drags it to the empty edges of a city, turning a communal act into a private, illegible performance.
Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s 2010 watercolour, Carnaval en la periferia, stages this exact contradiction. The painting does not show a crowd, but a knot of three figures tangled in an act I can’t quite name. One body, dressed in grey, is folded in on itself; its identity completely erased by the very posture of its collapse. The other, in a racist costume, spills to one side. Its head is the only stable point in the composition. They are suspended on a patch of battered earth, with the faint outline of a distant horizon as the only context. The title tells us it is a carnival on the outskirts, but it looks more like an event happening on the margins of society, in a space with no witnesses but one.
This interest in the discomfort of bodies in semi-public spaces is a recurring study in Moreno Sánchez’s work from this period. In paintings like Voyeur, also from 2010, figures share a lawn but are separated by a vast, unpainted chasm. In Transeúntes (2008), the passers-by almost form a group before dissolving back into anonymity. Carnaval en la periferia is part of this study of failed or incomplete social connection. The carnival, the supreme act of public communion, is reduced to a private, inscrutable game. The great white of the paper surrounding the figures is not an absence of setting; it is the visual equivalent of silence.
The image finds an unexpected ancestor in a work by that other great Spanish observer of popular ritual, Francisco Goya. His tapestry cartoon El pelele, designed between 1791 and 1792, also depicts a game with a sinister edge. Four women are tossing a straw mannequin in a blanket, and their smiles suggest a playful cruelty. The blanket toss is a public ritual, a game with rules. Moreno Sánchez borrows the energy of this violent game, but internalizes it. The aggression, or affection, or whatever it is, no longer has an external object like Goya’s mannequin; it is contained within the closed circuit of the figures. They are both the players and the mannequin, tossing one another in a game for which we have no rules.
The tangled bodies form an orderly, almost sculptural pile at the bottom of the paper, a curiosity presented for us to contemplate.
