Francisco Moreno (b. 1986, Mexico City) is a Mexican-American artist whose work reimagines history, myth, and identity through a richly layered visual language that merges Old Master painting traditions with contemporary and fantastical influences. Drawing on the technical rigor and compositional strategies of European canonical painting, Moreno destabilizes these traditions from within, using them as a framework to question the historical narratives they helped construct.

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Raised between Mexico and the United States, Moreno’s bicultural experience informs a practice deeply invested in the complexities of cultural hybridity, migration, and belonging. His paintings frequently weave together references to art history, Catholic iconography, and pre-Columbian and Mexican symbolism, placing them in dialogue with elements of science fiction, surrealism, and invented mythologies. Through this synthesis, Moreno constructs alternate narrative spaces where past and future collapse, allowing him to interrogate how identity is shaped, fragmented, and reimagined across time and geography.

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Central to Moreno’s work is a critical engagement with systems of power embedded within visual culture. By appropriating and recontextualizing motifs from the European “Golden Age” of painting, he exposes the ideological underpinnings of these celebrated traditions—particularly their entanglement with colonial expansion and cultural domination. His compositions are often densely referential as he reconfigures historical artworks in ways that both honor and subvert their authority.

 

As Adam Jasienski, Associate Professor of Art History at SMU, observes:
“I have long been fascinated by how Francisco Moreno’s practice interrogates that period, a ‘Golden Age’ of European painting. He pointedly asks: ‘what enabled the supposed goldenness of that age?’ and he confronts its cultural achievements with the realities of European conquest and colonialism, particularly in his native Mexico. His paintings are referentially dense in the number of nested borrowings and quotations from, and subversions of other artworks, of masterworks, that they contain.”

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Moreno earned his BFA in Painting from the University of Texas at Arlington and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been exhibited widely in both national and international contexts, including solo presentations at prominent institutions and galleries throughout the United States. He has received numerous awards and grants, notably support from the Nasher Sculpture Center. His forthcoming show, Historia Sintética, curated by Thomas Feulmer at the Dallas Contemporary will be on view through August 30, 2026.

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Moreno currently lives and works in Dallas, Texas.