<\/p>\n
Francisco Moreno with his 2022 painting,\u00a0The Artist at Work.<\/p>\n
Kevin Todora<\/p>\n
The 50 artworks in \u201cFrancisco Moreno: Historia Sint\u00e9tica\u201d establish a commanding presence in the great hall of Dallas Contemporary<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 seeing all of them together in a single space is just staggering.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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”).<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno’s WCD Project, 2015.<\/p>\n Kevin Todora<\/p>\n The show is divided into six sections, the first of which centers on the\u00a0WCD Project of 2015, a response to Emanuel Leutze\u2019s 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<\/a> in a West Dallas warehouse.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n For the second major project,\u00a0Chapel<\/a> (which was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art<\/a>), Moreno built a full-size, 10-foot wooden version of a Spanish Romanesque chapel, and filled it with what he called a \u201ccollapsed archive\u201d of his \u201cvast library of images.\u201d Individual acrylic panel paintings from this period, such as\u00a0Artist\u2019s Hand<\/a> and The Water Spaniel<\/a> (both 2018), show how Moreno both transforms his sources (Jacopo Bassano<\/a> and Chardin<\/a>, respectively) with his own aesthetic, and inserts new elements from his own life and world.\u00a0Artist\u2019s Hand incorporates both the face of Moreno\u2019s dog Puck (a frequent guest star in the paintings) and the novel 2666 by Roberto Bola\u00f1o.<\/p>\n Inside Francisco Moreno’s\u00a0Chapel, 2019.<\/p>\n Kevin Todora<\/p>\n The third section of the show presents a set of Moreno’s history paintings. (In the art-historical sense, history painting<\/a> means paintings of important stories, including myths and legends, rather than of history in the narrow sense.) Like those of his artistic predecessors, Moreno\u2019s history paintings distill multifaceted, complicated narratives into single scenes, each one filled with figures carefully arranged around a central axis or focal point.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n While the imagery of the history paintings ranges widely across art history (The Artist\u2019s Journey<\/a> includes references to Hokusai<\/a>, the Satellite Towers<\/a> of Mexico City and the Aztec jaguar god Tezcatlipoca<\/a>), they just as much incorporate references that would be familiar to any North Texan. For example, A City in a House in a Room<\/a>\u00a0shows elements of the Dallas skyline emerging from within the shell of a D.R. Horton suburban home like the one from Moreno\u2019s Arlington childhood.<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno’s\u00a0Squirrel Red.<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno<\/p>\n Two other sections of the show, teeming with anthropomorphic animal protagonists, highlight some of Moreno\u2019s most popular work with fans and collectors. One series of paintings shows squirrels in various states of bliss. Another, collectively titled\u00a0In Pursuit, explores variations on the theme of a dog, a squirrel and a ball.\u00a0<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno’s Eileen in Pursuit, 2024.<\/p>\n Kevin Todora<\/p>\n Finally, Moreno\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Like the work of his inspirations Diego Rivera<\/a> and Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco<\/a>, 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\u00a0Orozco and Rivera.<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno’s\u00a0Stargazer, part of a cycle of five murals completed in 2024-2026.<\/p>\n Francisco Moreno<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n