Drawings become signals. Objects become records.
Images become data. Biological processes become systems.
Marcello Mercado, a German–Argentinian artist, operates with images as unstable states rather
than fixed entities. Through translation across biological, digital, and material systems, images are
displaced, fragmented, and reconfigured.
Mercado works across drawing, painting, installation, moving image, bioart, and artificial intelligence.
These are not separate disciplines, but operational layers within the same process.
Rather than stabilizing images, the work exposes how they transform, degrade, and persist as signals,
residues, or incomplete states.
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Rather than beginning with the image as a stable entity, the work starts with its conditions of transformation.
The focus is on how images behave as they pass between different systems, with each transition
producing variation rather than continuity. Drawing, painting, the moving image, and computational processes
function as distinct yet interconnected modes within this structure.
The result is not a stable form, but rather a sequence of transformations that cannot be fully resolved.
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 →