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Marcello Mercado’s projects are constructed as lengthy sequences of processes. Images, texts, bodies, landscapes, and obsolete technologies are repeatedly subjected to new procedures and forced to pass through other systems. For example, a photograph becomes a bacterial culture, a book is rewritten as an algorithm, a scanned head reappears as multiple identities, and a drawing becomes an electrical signal.
Each transformation leaves traces of the previous state, including delays, distortions, compression artifacts, missing information, and residues. Mercado does not remove these failures. They become the material of the work itself.
For more than three decades, he has developed an obsessive and open-ended practice in which no image, object, or archive is ever definitive. Each work remains provisional and capable of being translated into another medium, technology, or form.
Marcello Mercado, Untitled (Drawing), 2024. Charcoal and graphite on paper.
Marcello Mercado, Forest, 2014. Mixed media on wood, 50 × 30 cm.
Marcello Mercado, The Next and the Stranger, 2021. Object, wood and metal.
Marcello Mercado, Van Gogh Variations, 2014
Starting from the yellow tones of Van Gogh’s sunflower paintings, this work transforms colour into a speculative landscape. Using drones, aerial photography and digital mapping near Soest, The Netherlands, the project became a “Van Gogh Perceptive File”: an archive of colour, memory and light for the future.
View Media Works → Variations Van Gogh →