At the center of Juanma Moreno Sánchez's small canvas Rockets win II, there is a bright, garish sign. It announces a victory. Beneath this declaration, however, lies a scene of total pictorial chaos. A thick, smoldering paste of browns, ochres, and dirty purples suggests a crowd, or a fire, or a city dissolving after the fact. In reality, it is the moments just after the final buzzer of a basketball game played by the Houston Rockets.
This painting is the reverse side of the piece Rockets win I.
It is not the first time Moreno Sánchez has used a blunt title or phrase to provoke. Works like Dont buy conceptual crap (2009) or Otro puto selfie (2014) use coarse language to name and dismiss a cultural phenomenon. Here, the phrase is also part of the scene itself, a piece of ready-made public language. It connects to a long line of inquiry in his work into public gatherings, from the listless 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, together with its companion piece Rockets win I, presents us with a new condition: one where the collapse has already happened, and a cheerful, automated slogan has simply been pasted over the top.
The image of an imploding city has a long, 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 shatter, the sky boils, and terrified figures flee from a violence that seems to erupt 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 on coming true. The apocalypse is no longer an event to fear in the future; it is the background noise, the texture of the present. And over this chaos, we have mounted a giant screen to announce the final score.