Marcello Mercado

Seven Sunflowers Deleted / Sieben Sonnenblumen gelöscht

25.5 × 25.5 cm, 60 pages
2014

Seven Sunflowers Deleted / Sieben Sonnenblumen gelöscht (2014) is an artist book conceived as an operation of translation and erasure. The project takes as its point of departure the seven painted versions of Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh, not to reproduce or reinterpret them visually, but to submit them to a process of systematic transformation.

Mercado converts each image into text, and then translates that text into an invented language and alphabet of his own design. Through this double transduction—from image to text, from text to an unreadable linguistic system—the original paintings are encoded and effectively deleted. What remains is not representation, but residue: a trace of the image displaced into another operative register.

The book functions as a material archive of absence. It does not preserve the iconic image of the sunflowers, but documents the conditions of their disappearance through language, code and structure. In this sense, Seven Sunflowers Deleted proposes deletion not as negation, but as a productive act—one that exposes how images survive, mutate or vanish when subjected to translation systems beyond visibility.