Manuel Mérida, Cercle Rouge Vermillion

Manuel Mérida is an artist originally hailed from Latin America before moving to Paris where he currently resides. His work does not conform to the traditional notion that painting is an oil on canvas. Instead, he presents brightly colored pigments in their primal form: powder. These monochromatic colors are encased in a round frame set to rotate at a steady, consistent speed, causing the powdered pigment to move. The work is in perpetual motion, creating new gestures of forms, light, shadow and space that continually shift and are never the same.  Mérida was greatly influenced by contemporary kinetic and constructivist artists such as Jesús Rafael Soto, Julio Le Parc and Lygia Clark whom he met when he emigrated to France in the late 1960s. However, he considers himself to be a gestural painter rather than a kinetic artist. Mérida has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in Latin America and Europe and his work is in many collections including the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas.