Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s painting Voyeur is about two worlds that never quite touch. On one side, a knot of young people tangled on picnic blankets, a single organism of shared attention. Their limbs overlap, their heads lean toward a common center. Moreno depicts them as a single wash of wet color, their individual forms dissolving into the group. On the other, a man in a straw hat walking alone. He and the group are only a few feet apart on the same lawn, but the wide gulf of unpainted paper between them makes the distance feel greater. They are neighbors in space, but strangers to each other’s reality. This theme of social isolation is a recurring concern in Moreno’s work from this period; paintings like "Piso de estudiantes" and "Domingo por la tarde en el parque" also explore with fascination how groups can form these self-contained islands of feeling.
The title accuses someone. A voyeur is someone who looks when they shouldn't. The obvious suspect is the gardener, whose work seems like an intrusion on the pastoral scene. But he isn't looking at the group. His posture is given over entirely to his task, his gaze directed downward by the strimmer he holds. His is an active gaze, while the group seems absorbed in a state of being, not seeing. The painting proposes two different ways of being in the world and finds them to be mutually invisible.
This composition of overlapping solitudes finds a distant echo in Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the Edo period. In works by artists like Kitagawa Utamaro, figures often share a teahouse or a landscape but remain enclosed in their own private gestures and thoughts. This was not necessarily a vision of modern alienation, but a depiction of a social world understood as a collection of simultaneous, self-possessed inner lives. Moreno’s watercolor, though born in another time and place, arrives at a similar point, and uses the medium’s quick, suggestive language to capture the psychological spaces that open up between people, even in the closest proximity.
If the man is not the voyeur, then who is? The act of looking that most resembles a transgression is that of the painter himself. Around that time, Moreno made a whole series of works titled "Stolen pic I", "Stolen pic II", and "Stolen pic III", which confess to this kind of theft. Watercolor, with its demand for speed, is the perfect medium for a thief. It snatches a moment, capturing the essence of a scene before it can change or notice it is being watched. The painting is the evidence of voyeurism, the captured gaze.
Perhaps the key is in the pair of white flip-flops, abandoned next to the blankets. They are the only perfectly legible pair in the painting, an image of simple, serene connection at rest, while the humans around them are either tangled together or miles away in their thoughts.
