‘The dream of robots’

The first time I saw Juanma Moreno's work, I was fascinated by his ability to masterfully use traditional painting techniques and fuse them with a current and very contemporary imagery. If we ask ourselves what we are contemporary with today, it is clear that the answer is electronics and that our present and our future is conditioned by artificial intelligence, for better and for worse. I say with respect to the bad, some threats from the past have become reality, because despite all the scientific achievements and advances that must be celebrated, this advance, without realizing it and almost celebrating it, has transformed us into a society monitored and manipulated for economic purposes as predicted by some science fiction novels. And this is how we all have a device in our pocket connected to systems that use neural networks to, with the personal information we dump, bombard us with ads based on our habits. Because today we have become accustomed to seeing ads in exchange for free applications, has anyone thought that Facebook could be paid? In exchange, we have social networks that, if at first they were meant to connect us, the result is that we live like prisoners in Plato's cave, consuming an artificial reality that shapes our behavior stimulated by likes and advertising. This artificial reality projected on social networks is the imaginary chosen by Juanma for his work. This tyranny of images and the invasion of media has led us to a point where everything is trivialized and critical sense is lost, although I personally believe that we will not lose the notion of what reality is. Or who knows.
I wanted to encompass Juanma’s work under the term “cybercostumbrismo” because, although it shows the uses and customs of today’s society, it does so through a cybernetic gaze. In his paintings, Juanma represents images found on social networks in which the subject or subjects are unaware, artificially posed or in an abnormal state. A kind of anti-photos that feed the internet on a daily basis. These paintings are dumped into a neural network that in turn generates new images. What is most striking about the returned images is the grotesqueness of the shapes and that is that we are seeing through the eyes of a machine. Juanma once again pictorially represents these images returned by this artificial intelligence, attracted by them and their monstrous aesthetics like a magnet.