Sci-fi Surrealist: Mexican-American artist Francisco Moreno levels up with an epic survey at Dallas Contemporary

It’s been 11 years since painter Francisco Moreno took the local art world by storm with a hot-rod performance in an empty warehouse. Held during 2015’s Soluna Festival, his piece Washington Crossing the Delaware (a souped-up grey-scale 1975 Datsun 280Z) burned figure eights around the concrete floor, delighting an audience of curators, collectors, and creative bystanders.

For an emerging artist, it was an impactful way to put one’s name on the map, but for Moreno, it was just the beginning of more challenging and epic work that grew in scope and ambition as the years went by. The self-professed “sci-fi surrealist” always dreamed big and aimed high, and now institutions are responding in kind, giving him the space and time to realize his biggest ambitions.

Opening at the Dallas Contemporary during a plum slot in the middle of April’s Dallas Art Week, the survey Francisco Moreno: Historia Sintética (April 17-Oct. 11), is his first solo museum presentation, and Moreno isn’t leaving anything to chance. Including both WCD and Dallas Museum of Art-owned 13-foot The Chapel (his take on a Byzantine House of worship), Sintética will be most notable for five epic new murals alongside smaller paintings. Inspired by The Codex Borgia, they blend Mexican iconography with the stages of the artist’s own life. Simultaneously imagining a world in which the Inca conquered the Europeans, the inspiration for the series came from a source very close to Moreno’s heart.

“I was hanging out with my uncle, who is my Obi-Wan Kenobi,” he recalls. “He was writing a book about the four stages of life when (outgoing Dallas Contemporary executive director) Lucia Simek reached out. There are murals of creation, triumph, and becoming—the fourth mural is nebulous, but thinking about that last quarter of life. Then (the last piece), Supreme Consciousness, features the god of creativity floating in place.”

Following in the tradition of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros is a natural path for the Dallas-raised artist, who grew up in an environment where art was always valued.

“My grandmother was a painter, then when I was in high school, I went back to Mexico to see the murals by Diego at the National Palace,” he explains. “It was really moving because those paintings weren’t just paintings. The murals had a symbiotic relation with architecture and that made you aware of the sound, the temperature. The art was an experience enriched by its environment.”

Moreno’s uncle further helped him understand the creative life is one worth living, and he initially considered following in the industrial designer’s footsteps. After studying architecture for a year at Texas Tech, he decided “to express myself fully” by studying painting at the University of Texas at Arlington. As his mother was showing at the Upstairs gallery in that suburb, Moreno thought he might eventually show there, too, yet his dreams felt bigger. After earning a master’s in fine arts with a painting concentration at the Rhode Island School of Design, Moreno returned to Dallas and began laboring over WCD while imagining the impact of supersizing his ideas.

“What I like about these big projects is a lot of people in Texas don’t get to see Mexican murals or Italian frescoes or the European masters by Rubens,” he explains. “So, I was like, ‘How do I harness that energy and bring it here?’ I really hope these pieces have the kind of awe-inspiring effect those works create. There’s this curiosity about that monumental kind of magic that comes with these works.”

Ranging in size from 10-by-15-feet to 7-by-17-feet, the new murals are full of the same Easter eggs the painter first explored in his 2021 show, Demons, for the now-defunct Oliver Francis Gallery. His The Allegory of Weed Gummy and Alcohol-Induced Anxiety (also included in the Contemporary exhibition) depicts Bosch-like monsters and a classical calavera tormenting an ordinary man. Continuing to blend pre-colonial sources with imagined sci-fi elements, Moreno’s aesthetic is a collage of different cultures that look towards the future while honoring his personal history.

“I feel like I’m tapping into some energy and all I have to do is keep working,” he muses. “If I have any doubts about anything and keep working, the answers come. I think a lot about what success means, and I still think it means being able to wake up tomorrow and get to make my art. The show is going to be an incredible opportunity. I’m super grateful, so I don’t take it lightly, but I also know I’ll keep hustling and things will keep happening.”

—KENDALL MORGAN