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Artist Statement — Tarik Mendes
My practice operates at the intersection of painting and sculpture, where surface is no longer a fixed plane but an active, constructed field. Working primarily with layered net and screen based materials, I build paintings that resist flatness, replacing the traditional support with a permeable structure that holds both image and space.
Each work begins with the accumulation of translucent netting, forming a scaffold onto which mixed media is applied. Rather than depicting depth, the work embodies it. Images emerge through layers that simultaneously reveal and obscure, shifting with light, movement, and the viewer’s position. The pictorial field becomes unstable, suspended between presence and dissolution.
This material language extends into sculpture, where net structures are expanded into three dimensional forms. Across both mediums, the net functions as a connective tissue, linking works into a continuous system of construction and deconstruction. Painting and sculpture are not discrete categories, but reciprocal conditions within a shared spatial logic.
Through repetition, layering, and accumulation, the work negotiates tension between control and permeability. What appears fragile is structurally intentional. What appears open is precisely composed. The result is a body of work that exists in flux, contingent, immersive, and activated through perception.
tarik@tarikmendes.com
Tarik Mendes (b. 1992, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a New York–based artist working across painting and sculpture. His practice operates at the intersection of these disciplines, where surface becomes an active, constructed field rather than a fixed plane.
Working with layered net and screen based materials, Mendes builds permeable structures that replace the traditional support of painting. Through processes of accumulation and repetition, his works embody depth rather than depict it, allowing images to emerge through shifting layers that reveal and obscure simultaneously. This material language extends into sculpture, where net structures expand into three dimensional forms, establishing a continuous dialogue between object, image, and space.
Mendes’s work is defined by a tension between control and permeability, structure and instability. While visually seductive through color, texture, and density, the works engage broader questions of perception, fragmentation, and the construction of meaning. By destabilizing the pictorial field, his practice resists fixed interpretation, remaining open and contingent on the viewer’s movement and encounter.
He currently lives and works in New York City.