A Spanish national, born in Venezuela

Statement

The work follows three distinct lines: a fascination with pure colour; an interest in quantum theory and cosmology; and a lifelong curiosity for the body in movement, and how its position in space-time can tell us about an inner world.

The world is a chaotic cacophony of noise, colour and movement. In her work she tries to bring order, tranquillity and regularity. She wants to bring you in from far away, so you can submerge into the painting and forget about the world around it. Sometimes, behind the beauty and the precision, there are paintings that come with hard stories about the brutality of humanity.

Her objective is to create beautiful, unembellished paintings where the observer can experience the story without any superfluous distractions.

Biography

Verónica Marcano was born in Caracas in 1971. Art was encouraged from the start: she began art classes at nine, and before that coloured whatever was to hand — colouring books, and when there were none, the black-and-white newspaper, and after that the advertisements in the Yellow Pages.

She left Venezuela in the summer of 1989, at eighteen. Her father had been headhunted to a post-production company in Madrid at the start of that year, and she followed with her mother and her sister once the school year had finished. Her parents thought Spain safer, and thought there was a better chance of an education there: the universities in Caracas kept going into strike, and both daughters were about to finish secondary school.

Her education runs from a military school in Caracas to Fine Arts at the Universidad de Salamanca, and then to London, where she took a BA/BSc (Hons) in Design Studies and Fine Arts at London Guildhall University. She showed a solo exhibition, Illusion of Movement, in Soho in 2002.

Then she went to work. She spent most of a decade in film and television post-production in Soho — scanning and recording at Framestore, negative cutting, a long list of credits — and afterwards founded a web company and became Chief Creative Officer of a software company. In 2021 she was named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Software in Europe.

At the end of 2019 she stepped back from the company's day-to-day work to paint, and its directors encouraged her to. What followed was a deliberate re-learning: how to hold a brush and a palette knife, how to mix pigment, how to think as an artist — and then how to exhibit, and the business of it. In 2021 she was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Her work was shown continuously at Capital Art Gallery in Greenwich through 2022 and 2023, and she has exhibited across London and in Edinburgh every year since.

The Venezuela paintings

She is finishing a series about Venezuela: the migration out of the country; the disappeared — protestors, opposition members and ordinary people; and those killed in the protests against the Venezuelan government between 2014 and 2024.

Three paintings remain to complete it in its present form. Ideally there will be eighty-four, because she wants to represent everyone who died in those protests. It is the work she wants to exhibit as a group, and to tour.

Gold leaf runs through the series, and it is not decoration.

In several of my paintings, in particular the ones relating to Venezuela, the gold represents the potential for brilliance of the lives that are no longer here, the goodness and greatness of those who migrated, the resilience of those who stayed.

See the Venezuela series

How the work is made

A painting begins with an idea or a feeling rather than an image, and the first decision is which medium will carry it. The idea is then translated into colour, worked out in sketchbooks until the combination is one that tells the story.

Materials are mostly whatever is already in the house. She makes her own paint from the pigments she owns and buys new ones only when a piece demands it — which is how turmeric, onoto, honey, rose petals and flower anthers come to sit in a painting beside the acrylic and the gold. Those organic colours do not hold. In some of the paintings the fading is the point.

Nothing is improvised on the final surface. The ground goes on first, and then the composition is settled somewhere cheaper — paper cutouts, a painting on paper, a small canvas, or a photograph of the canvas drawn over digitally — before the painting proper begins. The flatness and the exactness of the finished work are the product of that testing.

She paints at home, moving between the library and the conservatory, at a metre square or under. That is not a preference. It is what the rooms allow.