Juanma Moreno Sánchez

Juanma Moreno Sánchez - Night at the Museum

Artist Biography: Juanma Moreno ( Alcalá la Real, Jaén, 1986), Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master in App Development for web and mobile devices, launches a new experimental creative process, which seeks to exploit the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence to open paths in the field of visual artistic expression. He proposes a new methodology of creation, in which the starting point is in the recent work of the author, on which a series of neural networks, with different capabilities, produce new content and at the same time self-referential. This result is re-interpreted by the artist. This "back-and-forth" process encourages reflection on the artist's own artistic language, on the language generated by the machine, and on the interaction between the two in both directions. In his career he has been awarded the production grant The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, New York, Fundación Antonio Gala for young creators, 10th promotion, Córdoba, GlogauAIR Residence Program, Berlin and the 1st Prize "Becas Lefranc & Bourgueois de creación artística", Granada. He has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his works are in public collections as well as in several private collections in Spain and Germany.

 

The Unsettling Valley of Juanma Moreno Sánchez By Marisol Salanova In the paintings of Juanma Moreno Sánchez (Jaén, 1986) there are many details that invite us to stop, at the same time that the desire to recreate oneself in them is unsettling. They are not pieces of quick consumption, of those that the public would discard passing in front of them for a few seconds. Something arouses interest and attraction through grotesque or disturbing elements that burst into the composition and provoke a certain admiration, followed by an immediate discomfort. One of the secrets they keep is the fact that such elements have been inspired by a generative artificial intelligence. Yes, we are faced with dreamlike landscapes and portraits of strange beings that arise partly from the artist's imagination and partly from the experimentation he carries out with an autonomous system. Thus, we are able to identify figures that are familiar to us but we find indeterminate masses, people with extra limbs and plants or objects in unusual juxtapositions. It is slightly reminiscent of those scenes by Lucien Freud where we discovered characters with three arms or three legs, in a singular mixture of figuration and surrealism. In the same way, the flesh, the physicality, becomes important in Moreno Sánchez's work with a plastic language that combines tradition and insolence, sometimes going beyond the limits of modesty. The theory of the Uncanny Valley comes from the field of robotics, was elaborated in the 70s of the last century and makes sense in the framework of Moreno Sanchez's work. It originally argues that when anthropomorphic replicas come too close to the appearance and behavior of a real human being, they cause a rejection response among people. We are captivated by the humanoid because of its resemblance and repelled because, according to the theory, it activates the subconscious fear that all of us are also soulless mechanical systems. This ties in with the anxiety of uncertainty about perception and the tendency towards predictive coding. We want to predict what is going to happen in our daily lives and in the pictures we contemplate, and if we fail to do so, the feeling is bittersweet. It is exciting on the one hand and frustrating on the other. Nothing bad is happening in the scenes depicted, however we observe a context of tension that is constant, underlying each of the artist's works that make up the exhibition project. A sinister event is going to happen, the painting seems to point it out. It shows us the moment before the disaster, a controlled chaos of indeterminate creatures, confused, expectant and beautiful in their strangeness. In fact, it is recurrent the presence of oranges, fruits that allude to the expiration of everything beautiful, referring to the ephemeral and short life. But also that perhaps tragedy is brewing, because both in painting and in cinema the appearance of oranges is often used as a metaphor to indicate that a problem or betrayal is looming. Schiller explained from philosophy that when we sense that "the sad, terrible and horrifying is approaching, it attracts us with an irresistible fascination". Even if most people do not recognize it. And that artists can allow themselves the freedom to capture this because they create a fiction from which to relate the unconscious. That which escapes the norm produces fear, index and sign of desire that resonates, in the most intimate, something unknown that scares us that we like. In an exercise of pictorial liberation, predominating the blue tones and a very special green, different textures veil serene faces, stopped and contained in each work. Animals of solemn profile and nature hybridized with mobile, computer or tablet screens, populate a conceptual universe in which the abject acquires aesthetic value to return to the viewer its dark reflection.