When we find beauty in the architecture of a killing machine, is that complicity? Or simply aestheticising horror?
The sky is a bruise of lavender and chemical pink, the kind of light a painter might borrow from a Monet sunset or the haze of a Bonnard. The explosion blooms in orange and yellow, and the rocket launcher's body is outlined in a vivid, almost acid green that has turned up in his recent work. The title is the coldest part of the whole thing: a brief, cheerful phrase that reads like a sports headline. That casual tone is the painting's first and most lasting violence.
The work belongs to an odd tradition, one with less to do with the righteous anger of war art and more with a sublime wonder at the machine. It finds an unexpected predecessor in a painter like Joseph Wright of Derby, whose 1772 canvas An Iron Forge rendered the fierce, theatrical light of industrial production with the dramatic reverence once reserved for sacred scenes. For Wright, the forge was a new sun, a terrible and magnificent source of power. Moreno Sánchez gives us the twenty-first-century end point of that industrial sublime. He paints the machine not as a wealth-creator, but as a pure vector of force, yet frames it in a strangely beautiful, almost festive light. The painting does not celebrate the weapon, as a Futurist might have. It simply makes it beautiful.
This refusal to provide a clear moral anchor is a familiar strategy in his work. He has a habit of pairing a title with an image that seems to contradict it, forcing a gap that the viewer's judgment has to bridge. He called a painting of a demolition Paisaje nostálgico and titled a frantic, muddy abstraction Recuerdo feliz. Here, the machine itself is a new turn. Where technology in his earlier canvases was often the passive screen of a laptop or phone, or the discarded junk of old televisions in Pantallas, this machine is active, caught in the very moment of use.
What is certain is the blob of thick, almost pure white paint set right at the heart of the ignition. It is the brightest mark on the canvas, and the most aggressively physical. It does not describe fire or smoke. It is just itself, a material fact, a gesture in oil. It reminds us that this is not reporting from a war zone. The painting is a small, handmade object whose purpose is to be looked at. A beautiful picture of something awful.