Mercedes Llanos — Galerie Balice Hertling
A graduate of New York’s Hunter College, Mercedes Llanos was born in 1992 in Argentina. For more than a decade, she has developed a powerful and deeply personal painting practice in which the world of dreams becomes a starting point for exploring the ways bodies are shaped by social norms and by the enduring influence of patriarchy on women’s lives, in Argentina and beyond. Balice Hertling Gallery presents Entresueños, the artist’s second solo exhibition in Paris.
Lines and markings ripple across the surface of the canvas. The body becomes both background and landscape, a terrain from which signs, memories and meanings emerge. Dreams mingle with reality, the living with the absent, desire with emotion. Together they create the in between space that gives the exhibition its title. Something rises to the surface without ever becoming fully visible, as if each painting were less concerned with representation than with revealing an inner state. At times, this intensity borders on excess.
Standing before Llanos’s paintings, one is struck by a sense of emergence. Bodies appear gradually within the composition, but what matters most is not revelation itself. Rather, it is the feeling of an original rupture, a liberating act of release.
The energy driving these works never obscures the clarity of the artist’s vision. Raw, earthy, restless and deeply felt, Llanos’s paintings unfold across expansive formats that reflect a bold and instinctive gesture. The work seems born from a process of catharsis before finding its way onto the canvas with urgency and force. Something is being torn away here. Something else resists. Her paintings exist in a constant tension between surrender and control, spontaneity and structure.
In the exhibition’s lower level, a series of paintings depicting plants offers a compelling counterpoint to the human figures upstairs. Here, precision and technical mastery mirror the emotional intensity found elsewhere in the exhibition. These works extend the artist’s vision while shifting its visual language, reinforcing a sense of belonging to a world where the boundaries between people, memories, dreams and forms remain fluid. Rather than resolving contradictions, they learn to inhabit them.
Expressive yet remarkably inviting, Llanos’s compositions seem inseparable from her own experience. In the text accompanying the exhibition, the artist shares a moving account of the many ways her creative practice is intertwined with her life. Her paintings evoke an organic and mineral dreamscape that unfolds over time with striking emotional force.
Bodies, alone or together, form the structural lines of magnetic landscapes. Their contours emerge slowly, like constellations appearing in the night sky. Limbs do not function as borders. Instead, they act as points of orientation, anchoring the viewer within the strangeness of the painted surface through something recognisably human.
Yet this sense of familiarity is never straightforward. It is as evident as the bonds we build through motherhood and family, and as fragile as the ties that connect us to others and to history itself. In keeping with this dual perspective, figures appear only to dissolve back into the paint that sustains them. Or perhaps the opposite is true. This uncertainty is central to the work. The figure is neither dominant nor subordinate. It belongs to the landscape and becomes its living core, while memories, emotions and ghosts shape the atmosphere around it. The resulting balance is fragile because it is beautiful, holding together the stories the paintings explore and the spectres they reveal, all profoundly alive.
Mercedes Llanos, Entresueños — Jun 12 — Aug 30, 2026 — Balice Hertling Gallery, 84 rue des Gravilliers, 75003 Paris
