Plein air painters often treat midday as the dead hour: the overhead sun flattens contrast and leaves nothing but glare. When Charles Burchfield took his watercolours into an Ohio backyard to paint Noontide in Late May in 1917, he answered that blank light by turning the muggy heat into a vibrating wave and twisting bushes into ecstatic Gothic spires. Moreno Sánchez faces a similar solar assault in Houston II. The trees burn with yellows that look more chemical than botanical, wedged against a dense blue that pushes forward instead of receding.
In earlier canvases like Fiesta en el parking (I) (2018), an expanse of asphalt served as the stage for human awkwardness, a place where people drink and kill time. In the group of small works from 2026, which includes Houston I and Rockets win I, the figures disappear completely. What remains are parked vehicles, lined up with the dull utility of company cars beneath a suffocating wall of trees. The paint here is leaner than in the pictures from his exhibition El Valle Inquietante, in Seville two years earlier. The coarse grain of the canvas glued to board slows down the brush and shows through the sky.
In the top right corner, two thin blue lines cross the sky diagonally. They are power lines, drawn with a quick, straight stroke. They do not try to articulate the composition or pretend at any grand perspective. They simply register the urban hum running overhead.