A photographer can freeze the perfect moment: the bat hitting the ball, the runner sliding into base, the impossible catch. The painter who tries to compete on that turf has already lost; it has been that way for over a hundred years. Another path is to paint not the instant but the blurred trail, as the Futurists did, turning the canvas into a record of pure speed. Juanma Moreno Sánchez, in this 2020 canvas, finds a third way. He paints neither the decisive moment nor the passage of time. He paints what’s left after the game has been run through a machine.
The title, Partido de beisbol triturado, tells us that the subject is a baseball game that has been shredded. A game is a system of rules, a container for a competition. This painting shows us what remains when that container is annihilated. The figures are no longer identifiable as players on opposing teams; they have been broken down into a frantic collage of limbs, fabric, and what could be viscera, a jumble of matter against a placid blue sky. This marks a clear turn from his earlier compositions of human groups. A canvas like Transeúntes from 2008 depicted the silent, separate orbits of people in a public space. In Chapoteo en una noche de verano, from 2018, the bodies are closer, entangled in play, but still whole. Here, two years later, that integrity has been violently blown apart. Like everything that was blown apart in 2020.
The problem of how to paint a mass of bodies in chaotic and violent collapse is an old one. It occupied Mannerist painters like the Dutch artist Cornelis van Haarlem, whose 1591 version of The Massacre of the Innocents is a knot of intertwined figures that is equally horrifying and elegant. In his work, the human form under extreme pressure becomes a beautiful, almost decorative element within a larger pattern of suffering. Moreno Sánchez finds a contemporary version of that problem. The violence here comes not from soldiers’ swords, but from the margin of error of an AI generation (loss). The game hasn't been lost; it has been corrupted, its components reduced to a beautiful and terrifying jumble.
The painting’s boldest and most debatable move might be its color. A photo of the creative process reveals a background of an almost fluorescent acid green, a color that belongs more to a digital green screen than a baseball field. In the finished work, this synthetic base is still visible, a glow that cuts through the more traditional, carnal tones of the oil paint. The green clashes with the figures. It creates a tension between an artificial space and the visceral, painterly treatment. It is a decision that risks pushing the canvas into incoherence, making the whole thing look like a collage of cut-outs.
Painted in the same year as other large, ambitious works like Juego absurdo and Asunción y descenso, this canvas is part of an investigation into disintegration. They are images of systems falling apart, of bodies trapped by forces they cannot control, whether gravitational, social, or, as in this case, the rules of a game turning against themselves. I couldn't say if the feeling here is one of horror or celebration, a spectacle of destruction or the birth of some new and monstrous form of life from the ruins of the old one. The title gives us a subject, but the painting refuses to give us the story. It simply presents us with the result.
