ABOUT ME

Francisco Merello was born in Chillán, Chile, in 1954. During his childhood the family moved to the city of Santiago.

It was his mother who realized that young Francisco showed a great interest in art. He painted and drew on any medium he could find, so he decided to send him to study drawing and later oil painting, with the great American teacher Thomas Daskam, who lived in Chile. Later he entered the University of Chile where he began his studies at the School of Engineering, then went through Architecture and finally Design. During this period he collaborated with the design of stores and magazines as the covers of Ercilla.

In 1978 he moved to Miami where he worked as an art director for 2 advertising companies. There he met his wife Silvia, and in 1982 his daughter Antonella was born. Far from settling in a style, he continues to investigate and capture his experiences and experiences in his canvases, with the belief that artists are agents of positive change for the world.

A few years later the family settled in Italy, where he studied specialization in conservation and restoration of works of art at the International University of Art in Florence. He deepened the different techniques of portraiture and began his career as a portraitist and painter, holding individual and group exhibitions. With more appreciation, he takes the plunge and moves to Amsterdam. It is here where he has an awakening and makes his most significant exposition of all; his portraits are exhibited at the Hotel des Indes in The Hague with great success. Merello usually works large formats, with strong colors and using various techniques, having developed over time a body of work focused on painting, both surreal, informal or symbolic, taking the human being, their roles and their environment as their subject; Being this painting that is transformed from the different visual stimuli, that is to say, it does not pretend to be dogmatic but rather the opposite, allowing this transfer of power, or influence of what “I choose according to what the work to create tells me.”

He returns to Chile where, together with his Dutch partner, he opens a multidisciplinary design agency dedicated to the implementation of corporate image. He is also part of the group “Other Designers” dedicated to promoting Made in Chile design through prototype exhibitions. In this context, it participates in the design biennial organized by the Saint Etienne Regional School of Fine Arts in France. During this period in Chile he designed and built his house on the Chilean coast.

After 5 years he returned to Spain and settled in Andalusia where he faced a new creative challenge, gastronomy, opening a restaurant and a beach bar. At the same time, he continues to work on his portrait and painting commissions. He divides his time between Andalusia and Florence and participates in the Bienal de Arte di Firenze in 2019. This allows him to get in touch with different digital platforms and art fairs as part of his new marketing strategy as an independent artist.

Artistic Career

International Art Biennals

2019 XIII Florence Art Biennal , Florence , Italy
2000 Biennale Internationale Design 2000 . Saint -Etienne. France

Selected Solo Show

2013 “Mediterraneo “. Club Marítimo Sotogrande .Cadiz Spain.
2012 “Mediterranean Lanscapes” Cabrales Art Space. Mar del Plata, Argentina.
2008 “Sport scenes” Alcaidesa Golf Resort. Cadiz ,Spain.
2007 “Images ” ELA Espacio Latino Americano. Bruxelles. Belgium.
2004 “Portraits” Club Maritimo Sotogrande. Cadiz . Spain
1996 ” Human Figures” Art Americas . Miami Beach , U.S.A.
1995 “Portraits” The Indes Hotel . Den Haag. Holland.
1994 ” Images ” Dedato Gallery. Amsterdam . The Nederland
1990 ” Abstract Informal” Metz & Co , Amsterdam Holland
1989 ” Abstract Informal” Israel Linka Gallery . Amsterdam , Holland
1988 ” Polo Accions Series” Santa Barbara Polo Club, California , U.S.A.
1987 ” Presence ” Galleria La Pigna , Roma , Italy
1986 ” Drawings ” Cultural Center LÚpupa . Florence . Italy
1985 ” Personale” Kens Art Gallery . Florence. Italy
1985 ” Paintings ” Cultural Center AXA . Florence Italy
1981 ” Cityscapes” Galeria Zurbaran . Buenos Aires . Argentina

Selected Collective Show

2021 “Over the realms dreams X Edition”, Firenze. Italy.
2006 ” “Swing” Banca Monte Paschi. Bruxelles
2004 “Portraits” Casa Decor . Madrid. Spain
2000 ” Prints Edition Collection ” Borde Rio .Santiago. Chile.
2000 “Prototypes Designs ” Catolica University of Chile. Santiago.
1993 ” Neruda ” Instituto Italiano de Cultura , Amsterdam. Holland .

MY WORK

FIGURATIVE – REALISTIC

“This painting by Francisco Merello is a painting that we must observe carefully, stripping ourselves of some of our loves and certainties, it is about attacking things that at first glance seem to be locked in an obsessive figuration, of a debatable taste, but if we can see some internal suggestions, we will realize that painting seeks a reality that goes beyond appearance, those sometimes acidic colors other times soft are strange to any pleasure or pleasure and force us to accept them since they propose a “way of being “that makes us feel that we have somehow dialogue

Piero Santi. Writer. Florence 1985.

ABSTRACT – INFORMAL

Francisco Merello new informal abstract, new ?? In the abstract expressionism of Rauschemberg from which the current trans-avant-garde derives, nor informal that shows nostalgic looks at historical expressionism and at the same time unpublished expressions of informal painting mode in France, are novelty.

On the contrary, then the historical resources seem to conform and dominate any idea of innovation. Well, Merello discovers other references.

Its impromptu imprint is now guided as in a way and therefore interested in following a track, a path already directed, mentally studied in each of its parts and surely evoking an already mythical iconography that goes under the label of “New Dada ”. So in Merello the reference universes overlap; Maybe DE Kooning, surely Dubuffet also Rauchenberg, and surely the New Dadas in a continually moving around that always provoke curiosity.

Rolando Bellini. Professor University of Brera. Italy. 1991

GRAPHIC – SYMBOLIC

I receive from Alkmaar, Holland, a letter uniquely in a mixture of Spanish and Italian to which should be added the Dutch linguistic contamination that the author is assimilating.
This peculiar letter contains the entire biography of Francisco Merello, a painter, a globetrotter a bit by vocation and a bit by necessity, who has found his country of residence in beautiful and civilized Holland, without having forgotten Italy, his second homeland.
Why do I mention these seemingly irrelevant details? Above all, because I met Merello through a Florentine writer, an authentic writer, eccentric, marginal for different reasons, but proudly convinced of being in the very center of the Milky Way of ” buñueliana ”memory. His name was Piero Santi, a discoverer of talents in all areas, both in the literary fields, where he discovered at first sight the potential poet or author, and in the pictorial where he also sniffed out talent early on. May this writing serve to pay tribute to him, since the current works that Merello sends me amply confirm Piero’s early premonition.

What do I see in these images? On the one hand, the expansion of Merello’s figurative repertoire, on the other, a chromatic ascent, a purity in the images, as well as rhythms and symptomatic compositional ideas.

Rolando Bellini. Professor University of Brera Italia. 1995

ENGRAVINGS – DRAWINGS

Francisco Merello invites us to see the forms that, in the apparent, define its limits and acquire its form, which is like the real of the unusual. In his painting forms of the real coexist that open their volumes with the intention of being the other face of the visible, the detail of a point of view, apparently simple, but that ends up being the key to an art of movement that rests on. in symbolism.
Vision is here a variation of the open grain. The contours of the figures acquire tonal dimension thanks to a light direction similar to the typical contrasts of the print and the arabesque, in which the movement generates charges of light by substitution. The idea of the human body in motion is a landscape that is renewed under the action of the imaginary. The visual order is close to the basic design, enriching it with a drawing of great precision and purity. There is in his works a manipulation of reality, with a trait of syncretism, which gives birth to the pictorial particularity of his art

Heriberto Lopez
Colombian writer
Brussels, 2006 Belgium.