Marcello Mercado is a contemporary artist whose practice investigates drawing, painting, photography, bioart and algorithmic systems as unstable recording devices.
Working across analogue and digital methodologies, his research engages with artificial intelligence, 3D scanning, data processing and organic materials.
His work examines the archive not as preservation, but as a site of transformation, erosion and recomposition.
Across media, he foregrounds instability, obsolescence and material memory as structural conditions of contemporary visuality.
Mercado lives and works between Argentina and Germany.
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.
