Painting a force is harder than painting a thing. The Italian Futurists took on this problem a century ago, inventing a language of "force lines" and blurred, repeated shapes to make the energies of the modern city visible: the speed of a car, the noise of a crowd, the rush of construction. Their canvases were diagrams of speed. Juanma Moreno Sánchez, in this small 2026 painting, faces the very same problem directly, but finds his subject not in the machine or the metropolis, but in small-scale physics.
The work is a portrait of a girl, but it is not so much a person as a physics lesson. The source of that energy is revealed by the title, Electricidad estática II, and the painting makes that force visible. Hair explodes from the girl's head in a crown of yellow and orange strokes, each one a vector of energy shooting outward against a vibrant field of magenta and olive green. At the center of this storm lies a point of absolute calm: the face, eyes closed, turned inward. The experience is purely internal. That stillness belongs to someone absorbed in a sensation so complete they have no need to perform it for anyone.
This emphasis on a contained, personal energy marks a shift in his work. Canvases such as Primer día con Iris en casa (2025) depict the frantic, conflicting realities of a home, while earlier narrative decompositions like El silencio (I) (2012) stage a world of external disasters. This painting, together with its companion piece Electricidad estática I, is quieter and more intense. The drama is neither social nor narrative, but biological. Moreno Sánchez has often painted the awkwardness of being in a body; here he paints the sheer pleasure of inhabiting one.