Joel Merino

Joel Merino is a Triqui artist born in San Juan Copala, in the Oaxacan Mixteca, Mexico. Self-taught, he drew from childhood, went through graffiti as a teenager and had his first exhibition in 2013 with the support of the National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. His work speaks of nothing but his own community: portraits of Triqui children and women in red-striped huipiles, painted with meticulous realism and framed by flat, vivid graphic shapes, to make visible a language and traditions Mexico rarely looks at. He works on facades as much as on textiles, and his career has taken him from Oaxaca, Querétaro and Mexico City to France, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Uruguay, Chile, Japan and the United States. In Paris, where he painted several walls and showed his exhibition "Niman'a" ("heart"), he left a fresco of three Triqui children on rue de Chabrol.