What does it mean to paint landscapes in the United States at the turn of the second millennium? In Alfredo Mercado’s moody and atmospheric landscapes, the artist provides us with his own answer. His paintings dramatize the tension between the romantic roots of landscape painting and the fragile existence of natural ecosystems in the post-industrial U.S.

The materials with which Mercado has chosen to create his landscapes suggest the lack of naiveté he brings to his vision of painting. The artist builds up his images from “mud”, the term Mercado uses for the random remains of his painter’s palette. Making use of whatever colors he finds left from the previous painting, Mercado challenges himself to develop both earthen textures and luminous points of light from the range of muddy noncolors his mixing technique produces. In these paintings, there are no pristine images of virgin territory, no clear and unsullied horizons. Rather, Mercado reworks his muddied paint into contrasting textures and temperatures, developing a layered surface that captures that complex moment of emotional or even spiritual resonance, in which nature meets human perception.

Mercado’s contemporary landscapes are neither pastorally beautiful nor cynically despoiled. They are honestly representational in that they reclaim for our time the beauty of landscape without ignoring the endangered context of landscape itself. In his visions, we see a melancholic record of the human impulses and feelings with which the U.S. landscape has been overwritten: ambition, desolation, violence, desires.

—Teresa Ortega