David Hockney’s iconic 1967 painting, A Bigger Splash, gave the world a clean and complete vision of Californian modernism where the human figure could be erased, leaving only the evidence of the disturbance in the water. The splash in Hockney’s painting is a two-second event that, as is well known, took two weeks to paint. The splash is the climax of a story without characters, set in a sun-drenched paradise of straight lines and impassive surfaces. The painting’s promise is that even life’s disturbances can be represented as an elegant and pleasing geometry.
Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s 2008 drawing, After a bigger spash, begins by invoking that famous title and then systematically dismantles every one of its promises. The world here is not a private Californian villa but any old corner of a European street, rendered in the grainy, smudged monochrome of charcoal. The sun is gone, replaced by a flat, featureless sky. And the human figure has returned, not as the invisible bather, but as a heavy, present, hunched and awkward body. This returning figure is the body in the street, naked and out of place.
The drawing is an argument made in charcoal and paint. The city world is a study in tones, a place of textures, shadows and visual noise reminiscent of the anonymous urban scenes Moreno Sánchez was painting around the same time, as in his oil painting Transeúntes from that same year. But into this sober, monochrome reality, two patches of a jarringly bright, flat blue have been dropped. The sky and the small puddle of water are the same flat, synthetic colour, a blue that seems imported from another kind of art, from the pop world of Hockney's acrylics. This colour doesn’t describe light or water; it announces itself as a quotation. This synthetic blue is the wrong blue for this rough world, and that is the point. The splash here is not a reminder of Hockney’s grand gesture, but a small, contained eruption in a puddle, a public fountain, or something that might not even be there.
This fascination with the splash, with the body meeting water, would become a recurring, though quiet, theme for Moreno Sánchez, reappearing in his 2012 watercolour, Splash, and again in a 2018 oil painting, Chapoteo en una noche de verano.
The drawing’s real risk lies precisely in those patches of blue. They are so alien to the rest of the image’s language that they threaten to break it in two. The collision between the gestural, modelled body and the flat, graphic colour is violent; a solution that creates a powerful visual impact, but which fails to integrate its two worlds. I can’t tell if the body is getting into the water or out of it, or what has led this person to be naked on a city street. The drawing refuses to offer a story, a psychology or a moral. It only offers a collision of materials and histories, leaving the figure stranded between the physical world of the charcoal street and the artificial paradise of a blue that feels like the memory of some summer.
