Santos

Contemporary artist Pablo Merchante is originally from Sevilla, and currently, he lives and works in Bollullos, Spain. The architecture of his paintings is part of their final conception. In them, pictorial resources are defined as periods and commas in a poem, illegible symbols in a score, or disjointed memories in the subconscious. From that procedural skeleton, Merchante forms the figurative approaches and abstract investigations; the planes of color, small syntheses, intentions, plants, portraits, and zoom.

In a sense of the material, his paintings are open without complexes; abstract brushes of paint, barely visible pencil touches, and symbols made in spray paint. And at times it even feels as if the artist spits paint at the viewer. Gaps, cracks, and empty spaces that fill his work are actually raw and white linen or gesso primer, almost untouched surfaces. Those purposefully missed by Pablo Merchante places are actually the doors through which an observer enters the work.

Merchante’s work is very intuitive; therefore the importance of the image in his paintings is very subjective. Sometimes, images in his works hint at the appearance of reality, as if suggesting concrete reflection. While in other cases the artist presents the image as a pictorial exercise and encourages viewers to solve that abstract riddle through their intellectual effort.