Juanma Moreno Sanchez

Juanma Moreno Sánchez - Night at the Museum

Biografía del Artista: Juanma Moreno (Alcalá la Real, Jaén, 1986), a graduate in Fine Arts and Master in Application Development for the web and mobile devices, launches a new experimental creative process that seeks to exploit the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence to open paths in the field of visual artistic expression. He proposes a new creative methodology, in which the starting point is the author's recent work, on which a series of neural networks, with different capacities, produce new and at the same time self-referential content. This result is re-interpreted by the artist. This "back and forth" process encourages reflection on artistic language itself, on the language generated by the machine, and on the interaction between both in one sense and another. Her career includes the following awards: The Pollock-Krasner Foundation production grant, New York; the Antonio Gala Foundation for young creators, 10th promotion, Córdoba; the GlogauAIR Residence Program, Berlin; and the 1st Prize “Lefranc&Bourgueois Scholarships for artistic creation”, Granada. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions and her works can be found in both public and private collections in Spain and Germany.

The Uncanny Valley by Juanma Moreno Sánchez By Marisol Salanova In the paintings of Juanma Moreno Sánchez (Jaén, 1986) there are many details that invite you to stop, while at the same time stirring up the desire to linger over them. They are not pieces for quick consumption, the kind that the public would discard after passing by 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 immediate discomfort. One of the secrets they hold 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 discover characters with three arms or three legs, in a singular mix of figuration and surrealism. Similarly, the flesh, the physicality, becomes important in the work of Moreno Sánchez with a plastic language that combines tradition and insolence, sometimes crossing the limits of modesty. The Uncanny Valley theory comes from the field of robotics, was developed in the 1970s, and makes sense in the context of Moreno Sánchez's work. Originally, it 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 it is similar and repels us because, according to the theory, it activates the subconscious fear that we are all, too, soulless mechanical systems. This connects with the anxiety of uncertainty about perception and the tendency towards predictive coding. We want to predict what will happen in our daily lives and in the paintings we look at; if we don't succeed, the feeling is bittersweet. It is exciting on the one hand and frustrating on the other. Nothing bad is happening in the scenes depicted, but 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 about to occur, the painting seems to indicate this. It shows us the moment before the disaster, a controlled chaos of indeterminate creatures, confused, expectant and beautiful in their strangeness. In fact, the presence of oranges is recurrent, fruits that allude to the transience of all that is beautiful, referring to the ephemeral and short nature of life. But also to the fact that tragedy is perhaps brewing, because both in painting and in film the appearance of oranges is often used as a metaphor to indicate that a problem or betrayal is approaching. Schiller explained from a philosophical perspective that when we feel that something is approaching, “the sad, terrible and horrendous attracts us with an irresistible fascination.” Although most people do not recognize it, artists can allow themselves the freedom to express this because they create a fiction from which to relate the unconscious. That which escapes norms produces fear, an index and sign of desire that makes something unknown resonate in the most intimate part of us, something that scares us into liking it. In an exercise of pictorial liberation, with blue tones and a very special green predominating, different textures veil serene, still and contained faces in each work. Animals with solemn profiles and nature hybridized with mobile, computer or tablet screens populate a conceptual universe in which the abject takes on aesthetic value to return its dark reflection to the viewer.