The Afterimage of the Impact
A weapon fires. In a blast of orange, ochre, and a thick, startling smear of pinkish-white, a missile climbs into a sky the colour of a bruise. The launch vehicle, an angular beast of military green, sits braced against the dirt, kicking up a storm of dust and what looks like blood. The moment is all violence and upward force. But the painting holds it in a strange suspension. The sky is not the blue of atmosphere but the washed-out lilac and cyan of a dying screen. The explosion is not just fire; it is a flower of pure, beautiful paint, a physical crest of pigment on the flat of the canvas. This is the imagery of modern warfare, but it has been slowed down, rendered by hand, and given a profoundly unsettling beauty.
The title does not explain. It reports. Rockets win I. The phrase has the blunt, declarative tone of a sports score or a breaking news banner. It is the language of the internet, where complex events are flattened into memes and viral clips. This is not the first time Juanma Moreno Sánchez has borrowed his titles from the casual slang and digital ephemera of our time, as in works like "Otro puto selfie" (2014) or "Chat GPT soñando con sentir cosas" (2022). Here, the phrase wrenches the image out of the realm of solemn history painting and drops it into the chaotic, amoral flow of the social media feed. It acknowledges where we are most likely to have seen this scene before: not in a gallery, but on a phone, scrolling past videos of military hardware set to pop music, its destructive power reframed as a grim kind of entertainment.
What happens when such an image, born digital and destined for infinite, fleeting circulation, is painstakingly remade in oil paint? The theorist Hito Steyerl, in her 2009 essay "In Defense of the Poor Image," described the life of the low-resolution, compressed files that travel fastest across our networks. This painting feels like the ghost of a poor image, resurrected. The hazy, pixelated quality of the sky and the acid-bright colours are the artifacts of digital compression, now translated into the slow, deliberate language of brushstrokes. By rendering the transient as something permanent and textured, Moreno Sánchez forces a confrontation. He takes a spectacle designed to be consumed in seconds and makes it into an object that demands sustained looking, returning to it a weight and material presence that its digital form sheds.
There is a historical echo here, a rhyme with Andy Warhol’s "Death and Disaster" series from the 1960s. Warhol took newspaper images of car crashes and electric chairs and silk-screened them in vibrant, often jarringly cheerful colours. He understood the chilling disconnect that occurs when horrific events become reproducible media images. Moreno Sánchez works with a similar contradiction, but for a different age. Where Warhol used the mechanical process of screen-printing to mirror the coldness of mass media, Moreno Sánchez uses the expressive, human touch of oil painting to represent an image that feels fundamentally inhuman and algorithmic. The result is a collision of textures: the hot, violent subject matter, the cool detachment of its digital source, and the warm, physical reality of the paint itself.
And it is this physicality that holds the final argument. At just 25 by 20 centimetres, the painting is an intimate object. Its scale is that of a tablet screen or a book, drawing the body near to inspect its surface. Up close, the illusion of the scene gives way to the facts of its making. You see the weave of the canvas in the sky. You see the thick ridge of white paint that is the heart of the explosion. You see the thin, nervous antenna rising from the vehicle’s chassis. The painting arrests the slick, frictionless image of war and gives it a body, complete with flaws and texture.
Rockets win I does not moralise. It captures the deeply vexed condition of watching conflict from a distance, where the terrible and the beautiful, the instantaneous and the enduring, have become hopelessly entangled. It presents a spectacular act of destruction and renders it with a palette that verges on decorative. It leaves us with the afterimage of an impact, a flowering of fire and smoke that is both an aesthetic event and a harbinger of a brutal reality just out of frame. The title announces a winner, but the painting asks what, precisely, has been won, and what is lost when the view is this seductive.