Cori Mercadé

Ten years ago Cori Mercadé created a series of 40 drawings titled Veronica, referring to a story found in the apocryphal gospels: that of the woman who took pity on a suffering man and approached him with a gesture of generosity and care in order to ease his pain. A miracle occurred: the divine face was imprinted on the cloth the woman offered. The artist chose the cloth as the protagonist of her drawings—the loving, healing and compassionate gesture of Veronica—rather than the imprint of the face or the miraculous deed. The cloth is Veronica.
Cori Mercadé took as her point of departure an iconographic motif with a long tradition in the history of art, as she had done in some earlier works (with the Pietà, the Holy Kinship, the Stabat Mater…). Considering the history of art as a catalogue of emotions, experiences and feelings, the artist approaches iconographic tradition with eyes cleansed of pre-established meanings, in order to open reflections that awaken other senses of what is represented.
The fabric of the cloth and the line of the drawing, warp and weft of vertical and horizontal lines and little strokes. A repeated gesture, at times obsessive, almost automatic. It is through drawing that meaning is found and the appearance of other images is allowed: veronicas of insomnia, of silence, visionary, woven, of nocturnal chaos, of skin, carnal, of eruption, of alchemy, overflowing, weightless, of presence, of a hot flash, of an apparition, of moonstone…
A line that gradually conceals the image of the cloth, so faint that it becomes increasingly evanescent and misty. The cloth, lightened again and again in the weightless Veronicas, reveals the stone: an unprecedented iconography.
Excerpt from the text of María José González Madrid