nortada

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. nortada, 2021 is based on an image from the artist’s image archive and depicts a landscape of vineyard protectors. By abstracting the motive from its initial context, enlarging and distorting it by removing some of its elements, and reducing it to the very basis of its form, Pacheco removes the subject from the object, pointing to the impermanence of painting and image production, where nothing is fixed, and where meaning is transformed through time.

Pacheco’s approach in many ways resembles digital modes of content construction, based on an associative chain, where one thing leads to another and where content is created through rhizomatic structures, rather than through a linear approach towards narrative. Similar to the digital image, also here, the image is left anonymous, abstract, reminiscent of a pattern, open to association. Through his/her perception, the spectator becomes a protagonist of the work, an active participator in the blurring of boundaries between the interior and the exterior of the work, between the abstract and the representative.