Corail rose, 2026

Anthony Merlo  

Anthony Merlo is a French art marketer, founder of Atelier Merlo. He develops a contemporary practice of marquetry in which wood becomes a true pictorial medium.

After nearly ten years of practice and personal research into marquetry, Anthony Merlo decides in 2026 to dedicate himself fully to it. Primarily self-taught, he has progressively appropriated this traditional know-how to develop a language that is his own.

Starting from veneers from numerous wood species, natural or stained, he composes his works through cutting and assembly. Each fragment is chosen for its color, grain, and reflections, as a painter would choose his pigments. The material is thus never a mere support: it fully participates in the drawing, the light, and the depth of the work.

His universe draws largely from nature and the marine world. Between reality and plastic interpretation, his marquetry is born from the meeting of two invisibles: the wood under the bark and life beneath the water's surface. 
Animals, underwater landscapes, plants, and organic forms thus become the starting point for compositions where the material, the color, and the grain of the wood fully participate in the interpretation of the subject.

Another part of his work is born directly from the creation process of his figurative works. From the veneer scraps resulting from the cutting, Anthony Merlo composes more abstract works, which he calls his "Negatives". 
If they retain the traces, shapes, and colors of the work from which they originate, these compositions detach themselves to become works in their own right, conceived to exist autonomously. Reassembled, the fragments reveal a new reading of the material and the gesture: the abstract essence of a figurative work, where the constraint inherited from the cutting becomes composition freedom.

Through this approach, Anthony Merlo seeks to move marquetry out of its traditional register to place it in the field of contemporary art, while preserving what makes this technique unique: the richness of the wood, the manual work, and the unique character of each piece.