To depict a weapon with care is to enter a minefield. To find beauty in the architecture of a killing machine feels like a transgression. Are we talking about complicity? Or is it more about aestheticising horror?
Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s small canvas, Rockets win I, seems unconcerned. 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 painting. The explosion is a bloom of orange and cadmium yellow, and the body of the rocket launcher is outlined in a bright, almost acid green that has appeared in his more recent work. The title is the coldest part of the whole thing, a terse, cheerful phrase that sounds like a sports headline. The title’s casualness is the painting’s first and most lasting violence.
The work belongs to a strange tradition, one that has less to do with the righteous anger of war art and more with a sublime awe of the machine. It finds a surprising ancestor in a painter like Joseph Wright of Derby, whose 1772 canvas, An Iron Forge, depicted the intense, theatrical light of industrial production with the dramatic reverence once reserved for sacred scenes. For Wright, the forge was a new sun, a source of terrible and magnificent power. Moreno Sánchez, by contrast, gives us the twenty-first-century endpoint of the industrial sublime. He paints the machine not as a creator of wealth, but as a pure vector of force, and yet he frames it in a light of a strange, almost festive beauty. The painting doesn’t celebrate the weapon, as a Futurist might have. It simply makes it beautiful, and leaves the discomfort to us.
This refusal to provide a clear moral anchor is a familiar strategy in his work. He has a long history of pairing a title with an image that seems to contradict it, forcing a gap for the viewer’s judgment to fill. He called a painting of a demolition Paisaje nostálgico and titled a frenetic, muddy abstraction Recuerdo feliz. Here, the machine itself is a new twist. Whereas in his earlier canvases technology was often the passive screen of a laptop or a phone, or the abandoned scrap of old television sets in Pantallas, this machine is active, caught in the instant of its use. This painting and its companion piece, Rockets win II, stand apart from the strange, biomorphic figures of his 2024 works like Catástrofe en el bosque, but they share with them that commitment to a terrible beauty, a collision between the visceral and the lyrical.
The painting’s risk lies in its success. At just 25 by 20 centimetres, it is an intimate object, almost a devotional panel. By making the spectacle of war so small, so jewel-like, and so exquisitely coloured, the painting may make it too easy to look at, too simple to aestheticise. The pleasure of the thick, confident paint could bury the horror of the subject entirely. But perhaps that is the point.
What is certain is the glob of thick, almost pure white paint he has placed at the very heart of the ignition. This mark is the brightest point on the canvas, and the most aggressively material. The mark does not describe fire or smoke. It is just itself, a physical fact, a gesture in oil. It reminds us that this is not a report from a war zone. The painting is a small, handmade object whose purpose is to be looked at. A beautiful painting of something horrible.
