Marcello Mercado is a contemporary artist whose practice spans photography, drawing, painting, bioart, performance, video art, installation and sound. His work is situated within the fields of Post Internet Art and New Media Art and is defined by an experimental approach that integrates analogue and digital methodologies. Mercado’s research-based practice engages with algorithmic analysis, artificial intelligence, 3D scanning, data processing and organic materials, bringing together traditional techniques and advanced technologies in a sustained inquiry into the archive, obsolescence, material memory, displacement, the body, biology, code and experimentation.
I’m floating on procaryote-eucaryote fluids.
Marcello Mercado
I’m evolving towards an ecosystem
governed by microbes.
I’m between the nucleation of water
and a dead planet.
Within this framework, his drawings approach the act of drawing itself as an unstable system: neither illustration nor narration, but a field of investigation where rhythmic line, erasure and interference coexist. The line becomes a site of negotiation between precision and disruption, order and collapse. His paintings, in turn, probe the tension between surface and trace. Layers of pigment, noise and compression artifacts accumulate as palimpsests in which analogue and digital registers converge, producing works that resist stabilization or closure.
More broadly, Mercado’s practice is characterized by a systematic interest in processes of recording and observation. Across media, he constructs material and immaterial systems where lines, pixels, cells, algorithms and impossible numbers converge, positioning media not only as instruments but as objects of reflection. Through this lens, his work critically engages with the ways technology reshapes perception, representation and the image itself, foregrounding instability, decay and transformation as inherent conditions of contemporary visuality.
