Paintings by Pierre Merkl - Situations, Segues, Encounters

Situations

Intellect creating meaning with passion is art.

My painting puts humanism into contemporary art. This challenge inspired me to create “Situations”.

Situations exact harmonies and play tensions. Thoughtful and emotional; ironic and sincere; confrontational and aesthetic; referential and freshall the elements vie for the eye.

The style is abstract humanism:
crisscrossing conceptual and narrative strategies;
setting up internal and external compositional dialogue;
composing fictional faces as content into/onto ab-ex strategies;
playing the imagination-based painting of Poussin versus the realist painting of Caravaggio;
relating democratic idealism to Situationist existentialism;
weighting the dramatic with the austere;
creating an inclusive--and expansive--psychological istoria.

To the Situations comes the spectator.

The spectator, like the artist, must make choices.

The painter’s challenges are now the viewer’s.
All paintings are oil on canvas, 44" x 66", 2000-2003.

View the Situations preliminary sketches.