Every living thing occupies its own reality. For the baby, mouth wide open, the world is nothing but sensation, a one-person kingdom. Higher up, a cat sits stiffly, staring, its attention focused entirely elsewhere. A second cat investigates the folds of a blanket, absorbed in its own hunt. They are models of pure, untroubled presence. The adults, visible only as a hand and a pair of legs, are a landscape of flesh. The scene marks a radical departure from the quiet, devotional dyad of his earlier Maternidad from 2011. Twelve years have passed, and a great deal besides.
This kind of domestic chaos has a long history. A painter like the seventeenth-century Dutchman Jan Steen would pack a room with clutter. His noisy households are scenes of human failure. Moreno Sánchez's canvas does not aim to teach that sort of lesson. The chaos here is biological, not moral. Nobody is misbehaving; they simply are, their natures running in parallel, their needs in conflict. The baby cries because that is what babies do. The cats watch and prowl because that is what cats do.
The paint itself conveys that sense of competing information. The emerald green of the sheet and the jarring paisley pattern of the duvet fight for visual dominance.
Unlike so many of his recent works, which find their strangeness in machine-generated algorithmic bodies, the power of this painting comes from its intense, almost brutal familiarity. The subject is not a glitch in latent space, like the figures in Jardín triturado, but a crisis unfolding in a bedroom.
The small picture: a reference to Baby Beluga by Raffi.