Santiago Merino is a Mexican visual artist whose practice is rooted in constant experimentation with the possibilities of painting. Trained at Escola Massana Centre d'Art i Disseny in Barcelona and at La Esmeralda in Mexico City, his work brings together the traditions of Western painting, the legacies of modern and contemporary art, and the visual languages that emerge from our increasingly digital world.Across more than twenty bodies of work, Merino has developed unconventional techniques that challenge the traditional tools and surfaces of painting. Industrial plastic wrap, ink markers, small rollers, mechanical devices, and other everyday materials become part of his vocabulary, allowing repetition, gesture, texture, and chance to shape the image.Rather than treating technique simply as a means to an end, Merino makes experimentation itself part of the work. His practice continuously shifts between control and accident, the handmade and the mechanical, tradition and invention—expanding the possibilities of what a painting can be and how it can be made.
During his residency at Hotel El Ganzo, Santiago Merino continued a long-running investigation into painting through a series of material and technical experiments that became part of the development of his future work.Working with silver acrylic, Merino explored pointillist gestures layered over an expressive monochromatic ground. Across the surface, translucent textures and subtle variations in light create an image that changes through accumulation, individual marks becoming part of a larger visual field.Threads were used to delimit the composition, introducing another layer of structure to the painting and creating tension between the expressive background and the carefully constructed surface above it. The resulting work became an exercise in contrast: gesture and precision, opacity and transparency, spontaneity and control.Rather than arriving at El Ganzo to execute a predetermined piece, Merino used the residency as a space for research. The experiments developed here became part of an ongoing process leading toward his future solo exhibition, a reminder that an artist residency can be as much about questioning, testing, and discovering as it is about producing something finished.
