Pablo Merchante

Huelva Spain 1982

An evident raw energy runs through Pablo Merchante's paintings. A sense that can be described as primitive. The ritual, the ancestral and the vigour of the manual is always very present in his way of doing things. Merchante presents a work where the formal accent is placed on the complexity of tensions, the combination of finishes and the tactile quality of the works as well as the importance of tradition in our days.

His conceptual interest lies in the identity of today's human being. The diversification of personalities or the role of an individual within small and large social groups. The themes he uses are paradise and the human being. "I pursue painting as a language, as a form of reflection, but also as the best way to endure life". The pictorial resources he uses are defined like dots or commas in a poem or like illegible symbols in a musical score. From this skeleton are formed the planes of colour, the small syntheses, the intentions, the zooms, the figurative approaches and the abstract investigations... The final image may seem anecdotal or almost improvised, but in reality it is based on intuition. In some works this image insinuates the appearance of a vegetable reality treated as a mixture between still life and portrait, in others the heads or faces are positioned as the search for an ideal far removed from human nature.