Zac Merle's memories distort the moment he attempts to recall them. Living with epilepsy has meant that his mind struggles to retrieve precise memories, creating false or misleading ones in their place, or leaving gaps where moments once were. His seizures made participating in sport difficult during childhood, leading him instead toward art - a practice that for years remained just a pastime. Alongside his work as a graphic designer, Merle now practices as an artist in a sprawling communal studio in North London, not far from where he was born and raised, and from the home of generations before him.
Merle works exclusively with images drawn from his family archive or his own photographs. Though personal, these sources often feel distant - a tension between warmth and alienation that threads throughout his practice. Using a self-taught solvent and image transfer technique, Merle builds up dense, unstable surfaces. This technique functions as both a material process and a conceptual device; Merle embraces, even commands, ambiguity through these layered, repeated images. His figures are often faceless, turned away, or partially erased, recognisable only through their recurrence. A single figure may stretch across canvases by the dozen, or be shrouded by wide, gestural smudges of dark paint. The motifs that resurface - a cigarette between a woman's polished fingers, the collar of a herringbone suit, the broad, bare back of a man, two lips just before an embrace - are at once familiar and fragmented.
Merle's work is an ongoing negotiation with forgetting. As his impressions degrade with each transfer, they reveal the beauty and form that can be found in the fragile act of recall and the porous boundaries between truth and invention that define how we construct narratives of the past. Merle forces the viewer into this uncertainty - to come to terms with how we inhabit and interpret the context of images, to question what is real and what is false. Engaging with his work, we become complicit voyeurs who witness a mind in all its disoriented vulnerabilities.
Merle has recently started to incorporate found textile scraps, bringing more colour, pattern, texture, and geometry into his work. These pieces are stitched and seamed, their joins cutting through his imagery - memories on the verge of unravelling, their surfaces fragile. He has also begun padding his canvases, the images swelling out of his hand-made wooden frames, spares of which can be found stacked in the corners of his studio. Here, works hang around one another, stretching up to the ceiling, and lean along the wall - grids of images within the larger, irregular grid of the various canvases. The artist has divided the space into two distinct areas: a desk and storage zone, and a separate working area for building up larger pieces. This split allows him to balance the meticulous process of image transfers with the more physical demands of painting and layering. Merle regularly invites other artists, gallerists, and friends to see works in progress - his studio is both a private site of reflection and a shared environment where conversations can shape work. It is a place where he can test compositions, live with works over time, and allow them to evolve in response to both material experimentation and dialogue with others.
