One of the artist's first self-portraits.
That world is a crimson smudge, a social event reduced to pure noise. In response, he has created for himself a circle of operations, a zone of cold, well-lit clarity on the white tablecloth. 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.
There is a long, cross-cutting line in painting that finds a kind of sanctity in the act of intense concentration. The subject 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.