A specimen born of code, with an anatomy but no world to belong to. To place it in a landscape is to claim that this creature belongs to the earth, under a sky, among plants.
Juanma Moreno Sánchez’s Madonna (II) returns to the synthetic and alien deity he had already put forward in Madonna (I). The being has landed. It is sitting under a bright blue sky, cloudless and unnervingly uniform; a sky that seems less like an atmosphere than a digital background. The question is no longer simply what this thing is, but where it is. And the answer seems to be: nowhere I recognise.
This gesture runs directly counter to the long tradition of placing holy figures in the world. For a painter like the 16th-century master Joachim Patinir, the figure was often a tiny anchor for a vision of the vast creation, expansive and minutely detailed. In his Landscape with St. Jerome, the saint is a tiny incident in God’s vast and glorious creation; the real subject is the landscape. Moreno Sánchez stages the exact opposite. The figure is monumental, a chaotic pile-up of biomorphic, mechanical and textile parts that devours the frame. The landscape is the incident, a barely sketched context.
Assembling a scene from parts that do not match is a constant concern in his work. Canvases like El silencio (I), with its figures occupying the same frame but different seasons, show an early interest in staging these silent, impossible collisions. Here, however, the strangeness does not come from the confrontation between two human realities, but between the artificial and a world that is supposed to be natural. In Madonna (II), both the figure and the landscape it inhabits seem equally synthetic.
