Exhibitions
Xesco Mercé transforms the past into a new perspective
Xesco Mercé transforms recovered paintings, discarded objects and recycled materials into a new visual landscape at the Gothic of the Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs.
The memory of images can have many lives. In Mirador , Xesco Mercé starts from old paintings recovered from markets and from materials that have lost their original function to build new compositions where the past meets a critical look at the present. La Gòtika of the Institut d'Estudis Ilerdencs welcomes this proposal from July 30 to September 26, in an exhibition that claims the capacity of art to transform, recycle and give new meanings to what seemed doomed to disappear.
The exhibition brings together a selection of ten large-format works in which Mercé works on different pictorial genres, from landscapes and portraits to still lifes. The pre-existing works cease to be simple witnesses of another time to become the starting point of a new visual reality.
The artist constructs these pieces through mixed media techniques that combine painting, collage, drawing and assemblage. The process incorporates reused materials and everyday objects that have fallen out of circulation, such as x-rays, plastic fragments or components of disused technology. Elements that, decontextualized from their original function, become part of a new plastic language.
This operation of transformation constitutes one of the central axes of Mirador . Mercé not only reuses materials, but also images and memories. The recovered paintings retain traces of their past, but are altered, fragmented and reconstructed until they acquire a new identity. The result are works that question the way we look at images and, at the same time, reflect on the value we assign to objects and on the possibility of giving them a second life.
Recycling thus becomes an artistic practice and also an attitude towards reality. What has been discarded once again occupies the central space of the work, while industrial and technological materials coexist with references from the pictorial tradition. The past and the present overlap in compositions that seek to generate a constant tension between the known and the unexpected.
Mirador expands this discourse with 28 collages on paper by Capellades, a set that allows us to observe in more detail the way the artist works with superposition, fragment and reconstruction of images. The exhibition also incorporates a series of graphite drawings, which claim drawing not as a simple preparatory resource, but as an expressive language with full autonomy.
Through this set of formats and techniques, Xesco Mercé proposes an exhibition articulated around transformation. Old paintings, abandoned objects, industrial materials and everyday images are subjected to a reconstruction process that allows them to come back into existence in a different way.
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