At first glance, the title seems to point to the figure lying in the foreground, face hidden by a virtual reality headset, a body given over to a world we cannot see. But the longer you look, the more the title seems to infect the whole scene. The landscape itself feels like a virtual space, the constructed memory of a bucolic ideal. It is rendered in soft, diffuse washes that divide it into horizontal bands: a bruised blue sky, a misty green pasture dotted with what might be bison or cows, a shoreline, and an expanse of warm, ochre earth. The setting is not a specific place. The painting shows the idea of a place, an archetype built from a thousand other pictures of a peaceful countryside.
The painting finds its strange strength in staging a competition between two kinds of unreality. It is not that the foreground figures are ignoring a beautiful landscape; they inhabit one virtual space while physically sitting in another. They are ghosts in two machines at once. Moreno Sánchez replaces the classical dream of Arcadia, found in pastoral fantasies like Titian's Concert champêtre, with a contemporary version. Where Titian's figures were held together by a shared, if mysterious, mythological atmosphere, the figures here are islands. The man hunched over his phone and the body lost in the headset are not in communion with nature or each other, but with another world.
This concern with the screen as a disruptive presence, as a source of both connection and deep absence, has run through his work for more than a decade. The lone figure consumed by the glow of a laptop in Chatting (2010) is an ancestor of the ones here. So too are the dead television sets lying like beached whales across the fractured landscape of Pantallas (2010). In Realidad virtual, painted fifteen years later, technology is no longer just an element in the scene, but a condition of being in the world at all, as portable and immediate as the grass the figures sit on. Even the act of looking has become a subject, as seen in the earlier Mirando reels (2015).
The most telling figure in the painting is the one it takes its title from: the body in the headset, lying face down, face entirely absent. The posture suggests total surrender, a disconnected life. The work is neither a lament nor a critique. It is a landscape for a time when landscape itself is just one of several available realities, and not always the most attractive. It simply bears witness to a new kind of presence (or absence).