At the center of Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s small canvas Rockets win II is a bright, loud sign. It announces a victory. Beneath this declaration, however, is a scene of total painterly chaos. A thick, smoky paste of browns, ochres, and dirty purples suggests a crowd, or a fire, or a city dissolving in the aftermath. In reality, these are the moments after the end of a basketball game played by the Houston Rockets.
This painting is the reverse of the piece Rockets win I.
It is not the first time Moreno Sánchez has used a direct title or phrase to provoke. Works like Dont buy conceptual crap (2009) or Otro puto selfie (2014) use vulgar language to name and dismiss a cultural phenomenon. Here, the phrase is also part of the scene itself, a ready-made piece of public language. It connects to a long line of work on public gatherings, from the apathetic crowds of Fiesta en el parking (I) (2018) to the systemic violence of Partido de beisbol triturado (2020). But while those earlier paintings showed the party turning sour or the game falling apart, this one, along with its companion piece Rockets win I, presents us with a new condition: one where the collapse has already happened, and a cheerful, automatic slogan has simply been pasted over it.
The image of an imploding city has a long and dark history in European painting. More than a century ago, the German painter Ludwig Meidner produced a series of canvases he called his "Apocalyptic Landscapes." In works like his 1913 Apocalyptic Landscape, painted just before the First World War, buildings explode, the sky boils, and figures flee in terror from a violence that seems to spring from the very fabric of the modern city. Meidner was painting a premonition, the vision of a catastrophe he felt was imminent. Moreno Sánchez’s painting shows us the world after the premonition came true, and kept coming true. The apocalypse is no longer an event to be feared in the future; it is the background noise, the texture of the present. And over this chaos, we have installed a giant screen to announce the final score.
