The Party is Over
A party is a promise of communion, but this one is breaking apart. We arrive in a forest clearing where the light is failing. At the scene’s green heart, a gathering pulses with the strange, saturated colours of a chemical spill—jade, fuchsia, acid yellow. Most of the revellers are a blur of limbs and cloth, their faces hidden inside crystalline hoods that look like freshly mined gems or digital artefacts. They are a collective, but an illegible one. Our way into this chaos is the boy on the left. He is the only one granted the clarity of a face, and that face is a mask of pure alarm. His mouth is open, his eyes wide, fixed on something outside the canvas. He is here, but his attention is elsewhere. He sees the danger we can only feel.
The painting’s title, Secuestro en la rave (Kidnapping at the Rave), gives a name to this ambient dread. Yet there is no obvious violence, no clear victim or aggressor. Instead, the kidnapping seems to be a condition of the scene itself. The figures are captured not by a person, but by the event, which dissolves their individuality into a twitching, communal body. Their heads are anonymised by those geometric masks, reducing them to their colours. They are attendees, but they are also objects. The space around them is similarly unstable. The forest floor gives way to hard-edged blocks of colour and a smear of spray paint, complete with drips. These marks are not describing the scene; they are disrupting it. They are glitches in the pictorial field, reminders that a painting is a construction, a fiction held together by pigment and will.
This tension between the figure and its dissolution has long been a feature of Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s work. His paintings often return to sites of social gathering—a park, a public square, a party—to witness their breakdown. Works like Botellón en el pueblo (2013) or the more recent Festival de influencers (2025) are populated by crowds, but they are never celebrations of togetherness. They are studies in alienation, loneliness in public. This painting, made in 2024, shares a setting and a sense of incipient disaster with another work from the same year, Catástrofe en el bosque, but here the catastrophe is social. The square canvas acts as a container for the chaos, a frame that struggles to hold its contents. It feels less like a window onto a world and more like a screen, freezing a moment of systemic failure.
In a 2024 solo exhibition in Seville titled "El Valle Inquietante" (The Uncanny Valley), Moreno Sánchez explored the unsettling territory where the human and the artificial blur. That show, like this painting, was filled with hybrid figures and indeterminate forms that trigger a mix of fascination and repulsion. This idea of a productive disruption can be understood through what the writer Legacy Russell calls the "Glitch." For Russell, a glitch is more than an error; it is a refusal of a system’s smooth operation, an unexpected break that opens up space for new forms of identity and expression. In Secuestro en la rave, the painterly glitches—the spray paint, the intrusive geometry—function in precisely this way. They are moments of refusal. They stop the painting from becoming a seamless, easily consumable image of a forest party and force us to confront its artificiality, its very nature as a painted object entering a world saturated with fleeting digital pictures.
A gathering in the woods, steeped in ecstatic fervour and undertones of horror, cannot help but evoke Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings. Specifically, it calls to mind his A Pilgrimage to San Isidro (c. 1820-23), a work that depicts a procession of haunted, grimacing faces singing their way through the dark. Goya’s pilgrims are a unified, terrifying mass, pulled forward by a shared, primal fanaticism. Two centuries later, Moreno Sánchez gives us a different kind of pilgrimage. His revellers are not unified by a single faith but atomised by their experience. Their faces are not contorted by emotion but are entirely erased by their strange, futuristic masks. Where Goya’s horror was earthy and collective, this new horror is technological and isolating. It is the unease of being in a crowd while feeling entirely alone.
The rave was once a utopian project, a temporary autonomous zone where new forms of collective life could be imagined. This painting shows us what happens when the promise sours. The community fractures, the music stops, and the woods feel menacing again. The "kidnapping" of the title is not a singular event but a pervasive state of being—a capture by the image, by the algorithm, by a social demand for a joy one cannot feel. We are left with the boy’s terrified gaze, forever directed at an unseen threat just beyond the frame. He is the only one looking for a way out. The painting offers us no such escape. It holds us here, in the beautiful, broken promise of the party.