regato

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, regato, 2021 bears a strong relation to motives derived from classical painting, echoing traditional modes of composition (group portrait), or color pallet, characteristic for religious painting, where blue is associated with the garment of Virgin Mary, and red with the depiction of Jesus, later in his life.

By appropriating formal elements from classical painting and combining them with contemporary objects of daily use, Pacheco rethinks the construction of subject matter throughout the history of art, examining how the painterly gesture, the color pallet, 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 the role of hierarchy when selecting 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. Pacheco points here to the impermanence of painting and the wide web of dependencies with the external world when it comes to interpreting images.