Pablo Merchante
OCTOBER 24 - DECEMBER 5, 2024
MADRID
Circular hollows
Pablo Merchante's work is a constantly tense territory, a place where solutions are never definitive and where problems are transformed into challenges and opportunities for the creative process to emerge. Like a game of chess with itself. Like a solitary card game whose sole aim is to defeat itself. And in which tricks are welcome. A territory where uncertainty becomes the main energy, where a sketch is a problem and not a solution; where a solution is a new challenge and not consumption; where a step forward becomes a step back; and where the best part begins when the unexpected takes over, when the game moves forward and the canvas begins to surprise the creator himself.
There is nothing playful about it, at least in the conventional sense of the term. It's a game fraught with tension, in which the pieces of the puzzle don't always fit together immediately, and when they do, there's something tricky about it. Pablo Merchante subjects his work to different energies that he makes no attempt to contain. His brushstrokes speak of moments of euphoria and rage, lucidity and peace... a visceral intensity that permeates the surface of the painting and comes to a screeching halt when the painting becomes monotonous. It is in this moment of suspension, of uncertainty, of confrontation between force and silence, that something deeper emerges: the hollows. Circular hollows that appear in his works so that the viewer can enter and inhabit them. Observe. As if it were a Velazquez portrait, where the painter and the viewer form an intrinsic part of the painting, of its own fiction. When objects become sovereign, living figures on a human scale of 1:1, and plants and flowers fill the background with splendour, as Philip IV or any other nobleman worthy of the name did in his time. Individuals who, in their immobility, converse with the artist and the viewer in these quiet spaces where they are simply observed.
There is some kind of doctrine in the work of Pablo Merchante. Suddenly, without realising it, as in the great revolutions, the still-life is elevated to the rank of portrait, and the backgrounds leave their subordinate role to occupy the foreground, overturning the traditional hierarchy of painting and imposing themselves as protagonists with a force equal to or greater than that of the figure itself. A kind of ambiguous terrain, where we don't know who the protagonist is: the emptiness of the background, with its empty and absent spaces, or the represented object itself, the very subject of the painting. Sometimes, as in life, the absences are more important (or just as important) as the presences.
