Painting a crowd used to mean painting a collective organism driven by a single purpose: the burghers of a Dutch city, peasants at a Flemish wedding, soldiers in a history painting. A painter who takes on the subject today faces a new problem. The modern crowd is often just a sum of solitudes, a gathering of people who share a space, but not a reality.
The title names a celebration, but the canvas shows us a series of private worlds. A figure in a pink costume, half bird, half pyjamas, has its back to us, a recurring motif of performance and anonymity in Moreno Sánchez’s work that appeared years earlier in El artista excéntrico. Another figure on the right is fragmented, her body dissolving into a thicket of predatory-looking plants while she holds a cigarette. The figures are not taking part in a shared event; they are adjacent realities, linked only by the artist. This theme of the disconnected gathering has a history in his work, but while a painting like Pantallas showed the aftermath, a world of debris, this 2025 canvas depicts the performance in full swing. Alienation is the main act.
The painting’s structure might look like a collage, a technique used for over a century to bring fragments of the real world onto the canvas. But where the Cubists pasted newspaper to break the pictorial plane, Moreno Sánchez directly paints the logic of the digital feed. The block of hard-edged sky behind the pink figure looks as if it’s been imported wholesale from another image, a separate window superimposed on the scene. The oranges, jarring. This finds a strange and distant ancestor in the work of James Rosenquist, who took the visual grammar of billboards and used it to build his monumental pop paintings. A work like President Elect forcibly mashed together a politician's face, a car, and a slice of cake to expose the machinery of American desire. Moreno Sánchez performs a similar operation with the visual language of influence, showing us a world built from incompatible fragments.
At the heart of the festival are two bright, blank screens. They are the most luminous objects in the painting. They are active voids, platforms waiting for content, their emptiness a kind of expectant silence, like a hum. It is tempting to see them as an easy symbol of technological emptiness, and perhaps they are.
The canvas’s real argument takes place in the paint itself. The flat, pasted-on quality of the sky fights with the visceral, turbulent vegetation that seems to be consuming the woman on the right. This tension between the polished surface of the image and the chaotic reality beneath is a central concern in Moreno Sánchez’s recent work, which has consistently given a carnal, uncomfortable weight to digital ghosts and hybrid bodies, as in the unsettling figures of Catástrofe en el bosque. The painting’s title may be satirical, but the act of painting is not. The canvas insists on the material reality of this fractured world, depicting its absurdities with total seriousness. In the end, the most revealing detail might be the smallest. Among the costumes, the screens, and the performance, the woman on the right brings a cigarette to her lips. The act is an unglamorous gesture, a small crack of private habit in the festival’s flawless facade.
