Boletus

The politics of painting is the foundation of Pacheco’s practice, making painting the principal medium in which Pacheco’s works are conceived and his primary subject. His practice rethinks traditional modes of display, perception, and subject construction.

Despite the apparent randomness of its subject matter, characteristic namely for works, which depict objects from the artist’s immediate surroundings, and from daily life, Boletus, 2019 bears a strong relation to motives derived from classical painting, in this case, the motive of a group portrait. By this gesture, Pacheco rethinks the construction of subject matter throughout art history, examining how the painterly gesture, the color palette, composition, or fragmentation influences the construction of narrative and how images are depicted and perceived through time. Categories such as animate or inanimate, high and low, or any sense of hierarchy when choosing and treating a subject of depiction are removed. Subjects are stripped of their initial context or even fragmented, lending them a new life and new reading through modes of depiction, pointing thus to the impermanence of painting, and the wide web of dependencies with the external world, when it comes to image interpretation.