Robert Bechtle spent four decades wiping away any trace of human presence from the American automobile, using slide projections to turn chrome bumpers and station wagons into immaculate, sun-bleached planes. Juanma Moreno Sánchez approaches the machine without that forensic detachment. In Houston I, the pickup sits like a block of dark iron, hoisted on massive wheels and hovering over a patch of baked asphalt. Moreno treats the vehicle as a stubborn, physical fact that takes up space, dense enough to warp the landscape around it.
Cars and roadsides have hovered around Moreno's work for years, though rarely this plainly. In his 2018 watercolor Fiesta en el parking (I), parked cars formed a vague perimeter around a group of teenagers killing time on the gravel, sketched with a quick, watery indifference. Two years later, Cruzando la meseta stranded a lone car beneath the pale, vast horizon of central Spain, where distance swallowed the engine whole. Here, in the tight series that includes Houston II and Rockets win I, the machine is shoved right against the picture plane. The cardboard backing beneath the canvas keeps the format modest and domestic in scale, yet the paint carries the heavy friction of an industrial park.
Behind the chassis, the greenery catches fire. The trees abandon botanical greens, erupting into a virulent, electric magenta that bites into a hard cyan sky and a flash of acid yellow. It is impossible to tell whether that magenta shows a crape myrtle in full summer bloom or an optical glitch spat out by an oversaturated digital photo. That ambiguity comes from Moreno's habit of working from distorted phone screens and early generative image glitches, a thread linking back to the neon bursts in Me duele el flúor I.
The pavement in the foreground loses tension where the muddy wash can't quite make up its mind whether it is heat-scorched ground or excess thinner wiped away with a rag.
The painting finds its pulse in the friction between heavy, dark metal and that hallucinated greenery. The combination recalls Charles E. Burchfield, who turned ordinary woods into vibrating fields of unnatural color. Burchfield was looking for spirits in the brush; Moreno settles for the heavy stillness of a parking lot.