Biography

Paco Merino (1948-2004), a self-taught artist, left a deep impression on his countless friends. His open personality and enormous human sensitivity made Paco a dearly loved person. His artistic versatility, constantly experimenting with different techniques, and his ongoing search for new forms of expression, playing with textures, colours and shapes, revealed an artistic and creative tension that inspired admiration. Although some have tried to silence his contribution, the artistic and cultural history of Granollers over the last thirty years cannot be told without a maverick like Paco Merino.

Paco Merino Pavo was born in Ribera del Fresno (Badajoz, Spain) on 16 February 1948, into a large family.

He took up drawing and painting from a very young age. Paco helped his parents, José and Pura, with the work on the land. But they sensed how few prospects their son had in Extremadura and decided to send him to Menorca, where his aunt and uncle lived. Merino stayed there for eleven years, working in a dairy business owned by his uncle.

In Menorca he studied drawing at the Ateneu de Maó, although he would remain entirely self-taught, always driven by a great urge to experiment. His first exhibition came in 1967, at the Ateneu de Maó.

In 1971 he moved again, this time settling in Granollers, near Barcelona. He believed that living close to the city would connect him with the Catalan art scene far more than the isolation of a small Balearic island.

Merino would divide his life between Granollers and La Torreta, a district of La Roca del Vallès where his parents settled. He would never leave these surroundings.

Merino began a more experimental creative period, combining his exploration of painting with assemblages made from the most unexpected materials. As proof of this urge to experiment, in 1973, aged 25, he took part in the IX Biennal de Terrassa, and the following year he won second prize at the third Concurs d'Art Jove Ciutat de Granollers, a competition open to the conceptual art of the time.

From 1971 onwards he took part in almost every group show organised in the city.

Throughout the 1970s, Merino was a leading figure in the community life of Granollers and its vibrant cultural scene. In 1973 he became a founding member of the artists' collective Art Granollers, and a series of group actions followed under that name.

By the end of 1975 Merino claimed to have put his signature on some 800 pieces. A few months earlier, that summer, he gathered his most important work for a first retrospective, Paco Merino, cuatro años de pintura en Granollers, with around fifty works on view at the Sala Sant Jordi.

Paco Merino's drive was not only for personal fulfilment but also for bringing art to people and teaching visual arts: educating the eye of viewers unfamiliar with the forms of contemporary art.

This led him to take part in many educational projects at the Centre Comarcal de Teatre, in introductory art workshops for state-school pupils in Granollers and the surrounding area, in summer schools, and at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona.

Solo and group exhibitions continued to follow one another. Never much drawn to the world of art galleries, Merino moved without any hang-ups between conventional exhibition spaces and the bars and restaurants he regularly frequented.

After the experience of the Art Granollers collective, he opened the 1980s by founding the Associació d'Artistes Moderns de Granollers with eleven colleagues. It was launched during a series of presentations at which the first two issues of the association's publication, named Els Isards, went on sale.

At the end of 1980 he received one of the few «official» recognitions of his work: the Primer Premi Fornells Pla-Vallès Oriental, at a competition established that same year by the town council of La Garriga.

Merino had little love for art competitions, entering only four, and opposed officially sanctioned art and culture. His commitment did, however, lead him to join many collective initiatives with a strong note of protest.

In the winter of 1984 Merino returned to his roots on the island of Menorca, for a long and fruitful stay of nine months.

That same summer he went straight on to Logroño, where he took part in the fifth Festival de Teatro as visual arts director of several theatre action and animation workshops. In La Rioja, Merino discovered what would become a fruitful relationship with the stage, a language to which he would return often.

Perhaps the high point was the creation of the stage designs for two plays in Madrid: Mala hierba, presented at the Teatro Reina Victoria in Madrid in 1988, and Gracias abuela, which premiered at the Teatro Real Coliseo de Carlos III in San Lorenzo de El Escorial in 1989 and was also staged at the Teatro Príncipe that year.

In the summer of 1992 we find Merino in Menorca again. This new stay bore fruit a couple of years later, in early 1994, with his second major exhibition in Granollers, at the AB art gallery. It showed a selection of paintings on the edge of abstraction, inspired by the landscapes of Menorca.

In 1996 he was among the local artists selected for Berlin in Katalonien, a cultural exchange between Granollers and Berlin. His contribution was shown at the Rathaus-Galerie Reinickendorf in the German capital. It would be his first and only international experience.

The list of solo and group exhibitions in the most varied venues continued to grow.

At the end of 2002 the Grup Pro Art Paco Merino was formed, a collective of relatives and friends dedicated to preserving and promoting the work of the artist, whose output was immense and widely dispersed.

The artist died on 11 August 2004, aged 56, after a long illness.

His last work was a portfolio published for the members of the group. It contains three lithographs that the painter completed during the final months of his illness, accompanied by a selection of texts by friends. It fulfilled one of the last wishes of an artist who worked with his brushes right up to the end.