Ataque mercenario [Mercenary Attack] (1999)
Oil on canvas
61.2x 50.5 cm each
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 1999.3.4
The word ‘chaos’ quickly infers the opposite of ‘order’. There is a dichotomous division between these terms; but in Fermín Moreno’s painting, chaos and order can be understood as a feedback relationship, as simultaneous states of forms. What is unique about this artist’s images is that they question the temporal nature of chaos, traditionally understood as a primordial phase of matter: he considers there is no beginning and end. Everything is continuity…
His whimsical, dynamic and playful geometries, the vibrant colours and the monumental dimension of the fabrics recreate an enveloping atmosphere that continuously challenges the passivity of the gaze. Ataque mercenario [Mercenary Attack] (1999) is a work that overcomes the Greenberian contradiction of abstraction-figuration to make use of a more inclusive redefinition of abstract language, and the transgeneric expansion of painting since the 1980s. His reflection on ‘the real’ is based on an interest in philosophy, science, technological impact, architectural and urban landscapes, or in general the schizophrenic post-modern mindset. We find in Fermín Moreno’s painting a very personal exercise in experimentation that is based on the trends in painting in recent years and in which the conceptual and the purely retinal are not mutually exclusive.
Fermín Moreno Martín (Bilbao, 1970). His art reflects on painting from a practical perspective, by means of hybridisation relations with other artistic disciplines, working to produce an expansion of the medium structured around pictorial sedimentation, the feedback of the synthesis image and the installation layout. He thus increases the degrees of complexity of painting, by not only constraining it to traditional media and materials, but allowing the formal and conceptual principles of painting to be understood and structured, along with its relationship and configuration possibilities.