A line can trace the edge of a thing, telling you where a shoulder ends and the sky begins. Or a line can be a thing in itself, a mark that does not belong to the world of the painting. Painters have played with this ambiguity, but they have almost always followed the rules, letting the line serve the illusion. Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s small 2025 painting, Un buen día, confronts those rules. A furious line of electric pink has been drawn over the finished scene. This line does not describe. It interrupts.
The painting stages a confrontation with a very old idea. The figure seen from behind, the Rückenfigur, has long been a device for drawing us into a landscape, a substitute for our own contemplation. In the hands of a painter like Caspar David Friedrich, the figure from behind contemplates a complete world, sublime and charged with meaning, like his Woman at a Window, who looks out at the promise of the ships on the Elbe. Moreno Sánchez gives us the same setup, a figure with bare shoulders at the edge of a view, but corrupts the promise. The world this figure observes is full of flaws. The sky is infected with the same pink, a toxic bloom that outlines the clouds and a distant pylon.
This alien colour seems to have come from a screen. It has the synthetic, absolute quality of a thermal image or a digital selection tool, a way of seeing that belongs to machines. And yet it is an oil on board, a handmade mark. This has been a recurring question in his work, from the depersonalising glow of the laptop in Chatting to the strange, machine-dreamed bodies that appeared in his paintings around 2019. Here, the ghost in the machine is not a monstrous figure, but a simple, aggressive line. This line is a virus that has escaped the screen and started to cling to the surfaces of the physical world, outlining a body, a cloud or a flower with its garish pink.
If you look past the pink, the rest of the scene is not as stable as it first appears. The pool is a sheet of impossible, uniform blue, a hole cut out of the landscape rather than a body of water within it. The ochre fields are scraped and scarred, with marks that look more like frantic writing than blades of grass. The cat, a watchful familiar who has appeared in his work before, especially in Autorretrato con Puri (IV), seems to be the only creature at home here. Everything else is provisional and strange.
