The old machinery of sacred art, with its symbols and miracles, has been dismantled. A painter who wants to show a body aspiring to eternity can no longer borrow light from the heavens; they have to generate it from within the scene.
Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s Un altar antiguo delves right into this dilemma. The title promises permanence, stone, and rituals carved to outlast generations. The canvas offers the opposite. In a luminous, almost bucolic landscape of green fields and flowers, a precarious tower of figures struggles to stay upright. The structure is an altar of flesh. The three bodies, superimposed like ghostly afterimages, seem to melt into one another, their forms so unstable it is hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. The whole structure seems temporary, an offering built only for the instant.
We could argue that an ancestor of this piece comes from a much darker place: the winged, desperate figures of Goya’s etching Modo de volar, whose attempts at flight are an exercise in heroic and probably fatal delusion. Moreno Sánchez’s painting is a gesture of ascent stripped of its audience and its certainty.
This evanescent quality of the figures is a hallmark of the painter’s recent work, which often finds its source material in the impossible anatomies devised by generative algorithms, as in the monstrously serene Ángel III. Here, however, the effect seems less like the logic of a machine and more like a memory, or a flaw in a photographic print.
For all its energy, the painting flirts with a certain schematic simplicity. The serene landscape set against the struggling figures, the blooming rosebush at the edge of the canvas; they are sharp, almost symbolic contrasts. The work’s success depends on whether this legibility is seen as a deliberate return to archetypes.
The final irony is in the title’s claim to be ancient. There is nothing ancient here except the ambition to raise something up, to make a gesture towards the sky. The figures are not celebrating. They are striving. The top body, held aloft like a saint’s relic, is the most transparent of all, one arm raised in a gesture that could be a wave, a plea, or a final dissolution. The painting does not show us the god for whom this altar was built. It only shows us the physical cost of the attempt, the sheer effort of holding a form, for one more second, against the pull of an empty blue.
