The genre of the fête galante belongs to the French eighteenth century, a dream of aristocratic leisure where elegantly dressed people flirted and played music in a lush, theatrical park. A painter like Antoine Watteau knew how to fill these scenes with a delicate, tacit melancholy, but the people were always people, and their dramas and longings, recognisably human.
Estatuas en el jardín, by Juanma Moreno Sánchez, sets the scene. We are in a garden, under a flat, bright sky, surrounded by the acid greens and intense pinks of a summer day. The scene is full of action, of figures held aloft in an atmosphere that could be one of celebration or sacrifice. But the participants are not people. They are empty, doughy, and ill-defined forms, with faces blurred to anonymity and bodies that can barely seem to hold their shape. The title calls them statues, but they have none of the permanence or definition of a statue. They seem temporary, provisional, like mannequins.
The painting's power lies in this collision. It is the ghost of a fête galante, a party for hollow men. Where a work like Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes finds its drama in the subtle glances between a musician, a dancer and an actress, real people enacting a social theatre, Moreno Sánchez’s scene finds its strangeness in the performers themselves. These faces offer no psychology to read, no social story to decipher. The ritual is being carried out, but the figures seem like mere extras. The paint itself, thick and confident, asserts the physical reality of these beings, even as their forms suggest they might dissolve at any moment.
