“Merino’s paintings are hot. They glow with intensity and passion. Seeing them (not just looking at them) is to sense the excitement of a skin touching another skin in the flush of arousal. These paintings are not about sexuality. They are about eroticism and the sensuality of seeing. These paintings work out real events of pride, hostility, tenderness, lust, rejection… they are actual thoughts and responses crystallized into images […]
Most of us would try to say that our imaginative gifts distinguish us from everything not human. But the poet in the painter knows that imagination shows us that no meaningful separation at all exists between the souls of animals and the souls of humans. The poet is forever reminding us that we are one, irreversibly. In the Mexican mind, this truth has a very distinct quality […]
In Merino’s paintings humans and animals intermingle. They share a mask. They blend into one another without conflict or violence. They share mutual purposes and pursue them in elegant embraces. They are caught raw and naked in a dance that defines as it moves from point to point […]
They are like archaic pictographic murmurs of the past telling us that, although passion, energy and identity maybe ineffable in one sense, in another sense they are palpable, finite forces which cut in a multiplicity of directions.”
Richard Overfield, American artist