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Artist Statement — Tarik Mendes
My practice investigates the relationship between painting, sculpture, and spatial construction through works that challenge the fixed condition of the image plane. Using layered net and screen based materials as both support and subject, I construct surfaces that remain permeable, unstable, and materially active. The works reject the notion of painting as a sealed or static object, instead operating as environments of accumulation, interruption, and suspended visibility.
Each work develops through the repeated layering of translucent netting and mixed media, building a structural field where image and material become inseparable. Depth is not represented illusionistically, but physically embedded within the work itself. Fragments emerge, recede, and dissolve through shifting layers that respond to light, shadow, and viewer movement. Surface becomes a threshold rather than a boundary, continuously oscillating between concealment and exposure.
This vocabulary extends into sculpture, where the same net based structures expand into three dimensional form. Across the practice, the net functions simultaneously as framework, membrane, and connective tissue, linking painting and sculpture within a shared spatial logic. The works exist between construction and erosion, density and transparency, presence and disappearance.
Through processes of accumulation, repetition, and controlled tension, the practice examines how material can destabilize perception while maintaining formal precision. What appears fragile is structurally deliberate. What appears fragmented is rigorously composed. The resulting works occupy a state of continual transformation, where image, space, and material remain in active negotiation.
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.