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converting the forms, from the radical planeness Ultimately, one might consider the work of this
of the canvas, into “quasi-sculptural” allegories, artist as a sort of Borgesian abstract aleph, in
structures folded in on themselves, details from which everything may be included, taking up
a post-conceptist monadology. Showing affinities space but at the same time expanding beyond
with Franz Ackermann’s maps of the mind, and the edges. Happily , Moreno is not a
his pictorial hetero-topias, Moreno’s aesthetic is ‘fundamentalist of the art of painting”7; on the
at home on virtually any kind of surface: from the contrary, he squeezes and decodes visual art
central reservation of a motorway to a company’s strategies, disassembles and recreates the
reception areas, from the image provoked by black rhetoric, showing us that at the heart of chaos
light to the ‘electronic’ gloss of his huge paintings. (which he is also, theoretically, very interested
in) there exists a remarkable precision. Clearly,
“Recently, when analysing a number of the for his hard-hitting compositions he employs
paintings Jackson Pollock did with the drip a technique that is at once refined and concise,
technique, some Australian physicists found that “in order to speak of disorder , agitation,
the forms created were fractal and that, in the movement”8. Somewhere between hypnotic
years when Pollock was producing these paintings, and dizzying, the optical games played out in
the fractal dimension increased in direct proportion these works put me in mind of camouflage,
to his mastery of the technique. The physicists something that many artists, not least Warhol,
saw this as demonstrating that drip paintings, far feel the need to resort to. If, for the Factory’s
from being arbitrary, really did reflect ‘the mark of master of ceremonies, sexual desire was an
nature’”6. Where Euclidian geometry deals with abstract puzzle, one might say that the actual
regular forms (triangles, squares and painting functioned as a kind of veil or screen
circumferences), fractal geometry is concerned behind which the artist could hide, or
with irregular forms. I suggest that the work of camouflage himself. It was a move that helped
Fermín Moreno is concerned with disequalities, him to survive in a hostile environment. 9 It is
discon-tinuities, but also with the vertiginous probably no longer possible to aspire to sit
repetitions that bring it into contact, consciously down in the “comfortable chair of painting” and
or otherwise, with the theory of fractals. Benoît perhaps the only thing left to do is follow the
Mandelbrot coined the term fractal (from the Latin camoufleur’s strategy which means hiding
fractus, which describes a stone broken into (invisibility) and showing oneself (deceptive
irregular pieces) in 1975 to describe geometries visibility). But at bottom there’ s something
of what is not regular, in which all the parts of the traumatic in the pretence 10, as well as an
object, however small, have the same structure awareness of new (hyper-technological) forms
as the whole (plant life provides us with a clear of visibility that have to do with the most intense
example of this in the cauliflower, and anatomy, pleasure, with the fiesta, with the disordered
the lung). It may be that the fractal is a noise that takes us towards the precipice. The
mathematical reformulation of the notion of the situation of fracture or disunion 11 that goes
infinite, something that can also be seen in the from abstraction to the polluted contemporary
horror vacui of the defiantly lively paintings of imagination reappears in the work of Fermín
Fermín Moreno, full of lines that change direction Moreno, who has managed to sediment a
and untied knots next to massy bulks that vaguely polyhedral imagination onto the thin surface
recall rock strata. The post-Euclidian model of the painting, on a skin stretched tight as a
facilitated the analysis of what is rough, tangled, drum which, however strange it seems, beats
strange, fine, granulated, curled, tortuous, sinuous out the most energetic rhythms, a sort of visual
and ramified; in other words, of everything that, code where aboriginal immediacy and
analogously, has materialised in Fermín Moreno’s cybernetic glaciation are free to interweave in
paintings. a rarefied space.

7 “Without renouncing painting, but also without using painting as a refuge, nor the knowledge of agreed codes as a defence” 63
(Alberto Lomas: “Procesos complejos-intentos de sentido” in Fermín Moreno. Amateur, Bilbao Arte, 1999). (Alberto Lomas:
“Complex processes-attempts at meaning” in Fermín Moreno. Amateur).

8 Pedro Ramírez: “¿Quién teme al caos feroz?” (Who’s afraid of the big bad chaos?) in Fermín Moreno. Amateur, Bilbao Arte, 1999.
9 “ Andy’s 1986 camouflage paintings, for instance, exploit the effeminate aspect of brutality: as camouflage enables a soldier to survive by hiding

in the jungle or the desert sands, just like reptiles, the paintings suggest an effeminate theme (the sexual attractiveness of the soldier) beneath
the façade of a brutal style (abstraction).” (Wayne Koestenbaum: Andy Warhol, Ed. Mondadori, Barcelona, 2002, p. 241).
10 “Camouflage reproduced the visual experience of front-line troops: duplication, darkness, displacement, disorientation, fragmentation

and vertigo. If the nightmare hallucinations, amnesia, deaf-muteness, states of flight, fears and dizziness of shell shock seemed at
times like the pure invention of terrified men, the symptoms of that pretence were the equivocal reflection of the tactics of the
camoufleurs: mimesis, gradation, masking, disruption and emotion. War trauma and the trompe l’oeil of war are fashioned from the
same material” (Hillel Schwartz: La cultura de la copia. Parecidos sorprendentes, facsímiles insólitos, Ed. Cátedra, Madrid, 1998,
p. 186). (Hillel Schwartz: Copy culture. Surprising likenesses,unusual facsimiles).
11 “Abstract tradition by no means presupposes the existence of the man who feels at one with the world. It is rather characterised by
the sense of disunion, by the preoccupation produced by the changing nature of the phenomenal world and by the desire to redeem
oneself through a rigorous vision of space governed by laws, the urge to “translate the changing and the contingent in terms of
necessary and absolute values [...] since such abstract forms, freed from everything that is accessory and finite, are the only, the
highest, the most elevated forms on which man may look and thus forget the confusing image of the world”” (Dore Ashton Una
fábula del arte moderno, Ed. Turner-Fondo de Cultura Económica, Madrid, 2001, p. 171). (Dore Ashton: A fable of modern art).