The camera is about the instantaneous, the composition snatched on the wing, the “decisive moment” when everything in motion clicks into place. The painter's work starts from a different problem. Not the decisive moment, but the indecisive one: the fleeting glance, the blur, the near collision, the anonymous passerby. The painter gets to work on the ambiguity that the camera, by its very nature, resolves.
Transeúntes, by Juanma Moreno Sánchez, is a painting about the texture of such a moment. The framing crops the figures, catching the back of one and the side of another, a strategy that seems taken from a snapshot. But the slow, deliberate nature of oil on canvas changes the meaning of that glance. It’s not a snapshot, but a long consideration of a moment that, in reality, lasted only a second. This interest in the fleeting and the half-seen is a quiet obsession in his work from this period. The explicitly titled “Foto robada I” from the following year makes the subject clear, as do his glimpses of the unposed life of shared interiors, as in “Piso de estudiantes” (2007). He is building a language for the moments we see but don't necessarily notice.
The cropped frame and the ground-level view have a long history. A painter like Gustave Caillebotte used jarring, photographically inspired compositions to document the new Paris of the late 19th century. But a painting like his A Balcony (c. 1880) shows us figures seen from behind, looking out over a grand boulevard they seem to own. They own the view. Moreno Sánchez’s passersby own nothing. They are down on the street, part of its flow, with a destination we don't know and faces we don't see. They are not defined by their contemplative stillness, but by their movement over a carpet of damp cobblestones, where each stone is a sharp, cold note of lavender and grey. He is arguing with that older, more secure vision of the city, trading its bourgeois certainty for a more contemporary anonymity.
In a scene like this there is a risk of falling into a certain, somewhat generic urban melancholy. The faceless figures, the muted light, the palette of blues and greys. It's a familiar mood. The insistent blue of the denim, a patch of almost flat colour on the detailed cobblestones, seems like a way of anchoring the composition that verges on the illustrative. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I can't tell if the two main figures are together, if they are a couple walking the dog, or if they are strangers who have coincided for a moment in the painter's frame. The painting is better for not giving that information, for leaving a gap of pure conjecture between them, a space filled only by the rhythm of the stones.
If we look closer, the only creature in the painting with a clear, legible desire is the smallest one. A tiny dog, a chihuahua or something like it, is pulling on its leash, a tense brown line that drags the whole scene forward. It is a small, urgent engine of life in a painting about the ambiguity of transit. The dog doesn't reflect, the dog goes.
