This painting, one of the artist's early self-portraits, seems to be a reflection on the deliberate act of removing oneself from the room through sheer force of concentration. The prawn-eater's concentration on his work. The work of looking at the painting begins with the world he has decided to leave out, rather than with the figure.
That world is a hot, crimson smear, a social event reduced to sheer noise. The figures in the background are faceless, just a kind of urgent, unfocused speed. They are the party the man has rejected. In response, he has created a circle of operations for himself, a zone of cool, well-lit clarity on the white tablecloth. There, in that private space, he is absorbed in a single, delicate task. Moreno Sánchez's early work is often a study of social discomfort, a close reading of the strange spaces that open up between people, as in the shared but separate paths in his 2008 painting Transeúntes. In Comedor de gambas, the solution to that discomfort is to raise a wall of intense concentration, turning the act of sucking prawn heads into a ritual that leaves no room for the outside world to enter. His shirt, a spotless white, is the uniform for a social event.
There is a long, cross-cutting line in painting that finds a kind of secular holiness in the act of intense concentration. It runs from the Dutch Golden Age painters who portrayed scholars in their studies to this Spanish restaurant. The theme finds a surprising ancestor in the work of a fijnschilder ('fine painter') like Gerrit Dou, whose Astronomer by Candlelight from the 1660s shows a man hunched over a celestial globe, his face lit by his concentration while the rest of the world sinks into darkness. Moreno Sánchez borrows this grammar of absorption, but applies it to a radically prosaic subject. The cosmos has shrunk to fit on a plate of prawns. The astronomer's globe becomes the curved body of a prawn. The act of devotion remains, a dedicated and almost scientific investigation of a tiny, temporary fragment of the world.
Does the painting's mundane subject strain under the weight of such a serious treatment? Perhaps. The title, Comedor de gambas, is starkly descriptive, renouncing any poetic flight. The painting's tension lies precisely there, in the distance between the grand art-historical machinery of its composition and the insignificance of the moment it records. This tension is a risk the canvas takes openly. This will to find gravity in the popular, in the disposable moment, is a constant in his work from this period, visible in his treatment of a low-resolution digital image in Stolen pic II, from the same year. Moreno Sánchez seems to be asking what happens when the most intense and meaningful human experiences are no longer found in grand events, but must be sought in small, private, and sometimes slightly dirty rituals.
The center of the operation is in the hands. They are completely absorbed in their task. It is a body under total control, a tool used by a concentrated mind to dismantle another, smaller body. This controlled, resolute flesh is light years away from the chaotic, generative anatomies that would appear in his work more than a decade later, as in the tangled, surplus limbs of Ángel III. In this 2009 canvas, the body is not the site of the strange; it is the instrument used to keep the world at bay. The painting is a portrait of a mind using a physical act to maintain its own perfect, defended solitude.
The last thing you might notice is the other cutlery on the table, still carefully wrapped in its napkin, unused. He is eating with his hands. Within the civilized construction of the wedding hall, on the clean white cloth of his private operating theater, he has chosen the most direct, primal contact. The whole drama of the painting is in that choice: an animal act of consumption, performed with the meticulous concentration of a watchmaker.
