From 9H to 9B (2014), 25.5 × 20 cm, 134 pages

About the Book

From 9H to 9B (2014) brings together drawings, paintings and video works by Marcello Mercado as a single field of material and procedural intensity. The title refers to the scale of graphite hardness, not as a technical index but as a conceptual range through which pressure, resistance and inscription are tested.

Across the book, drawing is treated as a system rather than a gesture: a site where force, repetition and erosion accumulate over time. Lines thicken, dissolve or fragment, while color and painterly interventions enter not as expressive elements but as disruptions within a disciplined graphic structure. The works operate at the threshold between control and instability, between calibrated action and material excess.

In continuity with Mercado’s earlier investigations into residue, coding and transformation, the book positions drawing as an operative interface—one that absorbs influences from performance, video and algorithmic thinking without collapsing into representation. Marks function less as images than as traces of processes unfolding across media.

Rather than presenting a chronological overview, From 9H to 9B assembles a condensed archive of intensities. It proposes drawing as a temporal instrument: a surface where duration, pressure and translation are registered, layered and allowed to remain unresolved.