Painter · London

Verónica
Marcano

Flat, exact and very saturated. Stripes, circles, grids, single continuous lines, gold and copper leaf. Some of the paintings are about colour and nothing else. Some are about what happened to a country.

Enter the work →twenty-five paintings, 2020–2025

A flat gold suitcase, seen square on, centred on a deep indigo ground. Inside it a disc of gold leaf carries dark diagonal bars across its face, like the griddle marks on a flatbread.

Emigration2025Venezuela

A series in progress

Venezuela

The series she is finishing now, and the work she wants to exhibit as a group: the migration out of Venezuela, the disappeared, and the people killed in the protests against the government between 2014 and 2024. Gold leaf runs through all of it, and it is not decoration.

Eight paintings in the series →

On an ultramarine ground, about thirty small outlined rectangles arranged in a radiating ring, each containing a single continuous cream line drawing a human figure — upright at the outer edge, bent, folded and collapsed towards the centre.

Torture Studies2024

A grid of cells ruled in gold on ultramarine, each holding one figure drawn in a single gold line. Read down the rows the figures go from standing and walking, to crouching, to kneeling, to lying flat.

Never Forget2024

Small copper single-line figures scattered across a flat ultramarine ground in loose rows, with empty copper-outlined rectangles standing in the gaps between them where figures would be.

History Will Remember2024

Three lines

Her work runs in three lines, which she describes herself: a fascination with pure colour, an interest in quantum theory and cosmology, and a lifelong curiosity about the body in movement — how its position in space and time tells you something about an inner world.

Pure colour

Colour is the subject and there is nothing else to find. Stripes at exact intervals, a lozenge of graded blues, a field of vertical lines that bends as you move past it. Made to be looked at slowly, and from a distance.

Nine paintings →

Vertical red and yellow stripes across the whole canvas, with small domed silver studs scattered in a loose diagonal band through the centre and a row of them along the top and bottom edges.

Universe2020

Three panels of raised red strips separated by narrow blue channels, a wide central panel flanked by two narrow ones, each strip pinned with small metal studs top and bottom.

Red and Blue Triptych2020

Quantum and cosmology

Physics and scale: how things connect, what a network looks like when you draw it, what it means to occupy space at all. The forms are simple and the titles say what they are.

Five paintings →

A large flat turquoise disc on a hot magenta ground, with a single continuous turquoise line drawing a small figure that hangs from the disc by one outstretched arm, feet off the ground.

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon2021

A woven grid of teal, blue and white rectangles, overlaid with large interlocking circles outlined in gold and bright green; a small block of gold leaf and two blocks of orange and lime sit on the central column.

Quantum Existence I2022

The body in movement

One continuous line, drawn without lifting, in gold or cream or copper on flat ultramarine. Drawn that way a figure is fast, light and slightly comic — until it isn't. In 2024 the same line produced the Venezuela paintings.

Eleven paintings →