Santiago Merino

Santiago Merino challenges the concept of artistic work and gives it a new interpretation by exploring its material substance, utilizing works and objects created or used by other artists as his raw material. He establishes a discourse that appropriates the meanings assigned to the art object, transforming and reinserting them through his visual artwork into a new relational structure with which to confront a problematic art market and the authorship that supports its value system.Merino argues that there is no justification for elevating the singular over and above the series or collective. By modifying the appearance and context of these works by other artists, he seeks to redefine the place where art comes into being while at the same time investigating diverse formal solutions for the picture plane.To redefine the place is a key concept that runs through his work. A place is as much the material substance of the object, its formal solutions, as it is its spatiality and context. It is also, to some extent, a relocation of the forms-ideas within the concept map of the art system.A characteristic of his work is the tension between form and depth achieved through the optical qualities of opacity and transparency of distinct industrial and traditional materials. Furthermore, a minimalist analysis of the composite structure encourages him to examine and expand his pictorial exercise beyond the richness of the two-dimensional plane, and to integrate the third dimension as a constitutive element of his work.We see different artistic intentions and tendencies merge in the body of his work: geometric abstraction, spatiality, post-production, appropriation, a gesture of Neo-Expressionism. An internal dialog within the work reveals, covers up, and disrupts the varied issues that concern contemporary art. Transitions, transgressions, and relocations that lead Merino to explore distinct combinations and poetic rarefications in his art.