Azucena Pérez Merkel (b. 1996, San Miguel de Allende) emerges as a painter deeply committed to the revival of the language of baroque art. Yet her work transcends mere revivalism. To see her canvases is to recognize an urgent search for authenticity in a world increasingly indifferent to tradition.

Her training began in Mexico under her father Magdiel Perez and later continued under Raul Campos, Gerardo Ruiz, and Fernando Diaz. She later abandoned Mexican modernism and took up the study of classical art in Florence at the Angel Academy of Art, her education placed her within a lineage of painters for whom rigor is the precondition of vision. Her subsequent study with Adam Miller reinforced her sense that technique must serve not itself, but the disclosure of inner life.

What gives her painting its gravity is not only her academic pedigree but her inheritance: born into a family of artists, with Viennese forebears Georg and Luise Merkel, she carries within her the dialectic of tradition and modernity, exile and belonging, that marked so many Jewish artists of Central Europe. Whether this legacy is consciously foregrounded or only latent, one feels in her work a struggle with history and her own diverse traditions. the desire to restore continuity where rupture has prevailed.

Her subjects are not simply models, but archetypal embodiments of psychic drama. Vulnerability, longing, and resilience suffuse her figures; they do not only pose, they confess. In her hands, classical technique becomes a medium for existential disclosure: the human condition revealed not in abstract rhetoric, but in the fragile poise of a glance, the tension of a gesture, the charged stillness of a scene.

Pérez Merkel paints at a moment of transition, when the last century often dismissed painting as obsolete. Yet her art insists on the contrary: that through discipline and imagination, painting remains at the center of art. And is still the most profound means of making visible the complexities of our inner lives and the broader narratives of a changing world.