Francisco Moreno with his 2022 painting, The Artist at Work.
Kevin Todora
The 50 artworks in “Francisco Moreno: Historia Sintética” establish a commanding presence in the great hall of Dallas Contemporary, delivering a soundly affirmative answer to the question of whether ambitious history painting can still be made here and now, in the Dallas of 2026.
Moreno’s work is ambitious in both scope and complexity. The show is organized around three major, gallery-size installations pulled off over the course of the past decade, with numerous large-scale canvases from the same period shown alongside them. Each one of these is a serious achievement — seeing all of them together in a single space is just staggering.
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Within each individual artwork, the web of visual ideas that Moreno weaves together is intricately complex. Detailed wall texts help guide viewers into understanding the artist’s archive of sources and inspirations, explaining how he has composed them. As the show’s title indicates, the visual stories that Moreno tells (historia can be translated as “history” or “story”), are formed by bringing together diverse threads (synthetikos, Greek for “skilled in putting together”).
Assimilating vast swathes of Western and Mesoamerican art history and visual culture into his vision (of which Rubens and the Mexican muralists are only the tip of the iceberg), Moreno has at the same time a sharp eye for the suburban subdivisions, car culture and smartphones that are the stuff of daily life in the metroplex today. The resulting work appears less as an antiquarian journey into the past, than as a creative enrichment of the present.
Francisco Moreno’s WCD Project, 2015.
Kevin Todora
The show is divided into six sections, the first of which centers on the WCD Project of 2015, a response to Emanuel Leutze’s iconic 1851 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. For this project, Moreno painted a 24-foot panel and a 1975 Datsun 280Z with World War I-era “dazzle” camouflage, as elements of a tire-smoking performance in a West Dallas warehouse.
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For the second major project, Chapel (which was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art), Moreno built a full-size, 10-foot wooden version of a Spanish Romanesque chapel, and filled it with what he called a “collapsed archive” of his “vast library of images.” Individual acrylic panel paintings from this period, such as Artist’s Hand and The Water Spaniel (both 2018), show how Moreno both transforms his sources (Jacopo Bassano and Chardin, respectively) with his own aesthetic, and inserts new elements from his own life and world. Artist’s Hand incorporates both the face of Moreno’s dog Puck (a frequent guest star in the paintings) and the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
Inside Francisco Moreno’s Chapel, 2019.
Kevin Todora
The third section of the show presents a set of Moreno’s history paintings. (In the art-historical sense, history painting means paintings of important stories, including myths and legends, rather than of history in the narrow sense.) Like those of his artistic predecessors, Moreno’s history paintings distill multifaceted, complicated narratives into single scenes, each one filled with figures carefully arranged around a central axis or focal point.
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While the imagery of the history paintings ranges widely across art history (The Artist’s Journey includes references to Hokusai, the Satellite Towers of Mexico City and the Aztec jaguar god Tezcatlipoca), they just as much incorporate references that would be familiar to any North Texan. For example, A City in a House in a Room shows elements of the Dallas skyline emerging from within the shell of a D.R. Horton suburban home like the one from Moreno’s Arlington childhood.
Francisco Moreno’s Squirrel Red.
Francisco Moreno
Two other sections of the show, teeming with anthropomorphic animal protagonists, highlight some of Moreno’s most popular work with fans and collectors. One series of paintings shows squirrels in various states of bliss. Another, collectively titled In Pursuit, explores variations on the theme of a dog, a squirrel and a ball.
Francisco Moreno’s Eileen in Pursuit, 2024.
Kevin Todora
Finally, Moreno’s most recent major project, a cycle of five 19-foot murals completed over the past two years, surpasses even the Chapel and WCD projects in its stupendous range. It is organized as a sequence of the four ages of life from youth to senescence, followed by a meditation on consciousness and the soul.
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Like the work of his inspirations Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, the cycle presents a universal human epic using specifically Mexican cultural references. Steadily developing the story from left to right across the five enormous panels arranged to create a viewing gallery, the cycle is a tour de force of creative symbolism, fully worthy to stand in the tradition of Orozco and Rivera.
Francisco Moreno’s Stargazer, part of a cycle of five murals completed in 2024-2026.
Francisco Moreno
With the Mexican muralists (and the odd anomaly like Picasso’s Guernica) being the exception that proves the rule, the mainstream of modern and contemporary art largely abandoned the pursuit of ambitious history painting over the past century and more, ceding the field of grand epic storytelling to Hollywood. This development is a terrible loss — nothing more than a failure of nerve and imagination, despite often being couched in the language of inevitability and progress.
It’s thus wonderful that Moreno’s audacious attempt to recover this neglected legacy is taking place so close to home, and using a visual language that resonates so deeply with the intertwined cultures of Mexico and the United States.
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Details
“Francisco Moreno: Historia Sintética” is on view through Aug. 30 at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass St. Open Thursday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Free. 214-821-2522. www.dallascontemporary.org
Francisco Moreno’s A City in a House in a Room, 2024.
Kevin Todora