Mathieu Mercier
dal 25/11/2012 al 11/1/2013
Segnalato da
25/11/2012
Mathieu Mercier
Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard, Paris
At first sight, Mercier's sculptures and installations question the place of the everyday object in art, once its utilitarian aspect has been carefully dissolved. A central issue in his work lies in the uncertain status of the object, whose use value, reconsidered and diverted, makes it border on abstraction.
Since Sans Titre 1993-2007 at Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2007, Mathieu
Mercier has had no personal exhibitions in France.
After a first comeback at the Crédac last January, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard will
host a new project of the artist from November, 2012 till January, 2013.
« Since the early 1990s, Mathieu Mercier has been developing a protean, changing
practice; somewhere in between the aesthetic categories we are tempted to use to define
it. The elaboration of his work appears to proceed meticulously, according to a logic as
implacable as it is ungraspable.
At first sight, Mathieu Mercier’s sculptures and installations question the place of the
everyday object in art, once its utilitarian aspect has been carefully dissolved. A central
issue in his work lies in the uncertain status of the object, whose use value, reconsidered
and diverted, makes it border on abstraction.
Still, the most important dimension is not so much this perhaps undefinable balance as the
understanding of the demonstration where the work originates. Each piece by Mathieu
Mercier may be apprehended as the synthetic materialization of all the data of a problem—
in the scientific sense of the term—which the artist long confronted without reaching a
satisfying solution. He thus puts the problem before us with the ambiguity of a questioning
left unresolved, which is not to say that the work is not accomplished. Coming at the end of
a speculative process, each step of which has been carefully weighed, his works are
embodied thanks to a formal rigor that involves clean lines.
Mathieu Mercier’s approach may be grasped through the perfect relation he has achieved
between a non-linear thought that developed slowly and its embodiment in a work where
the line is predominant. He thus comes to us with a work from which his presence seems
excluded, but whose meaning and stakes are to be found in the mental synthesis it
materializes. »
Marie Chênel, August 2012.
Mathieu Mercier (born 1970) lives and works in Paris. Winner of the Prix-Marcel-Duchamp in 2003.
In 2007, the « Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris » hosted the first retrospective exhibition of the
artist, « Sans titres, 1993-2007 », then presented at the Kunsthalle in Nürnberg.
He is represented by the galleries Mehdi Chouakri (Berlin), Massimo Minini (Brescia) and Lange & Pult
(Zürich).
Press contacts
Antonia Scintilla, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard – +33 (0) 1 53 30 88 02 –
antonia.scintilla@fondation-entreprise-ricard.com
Opening: Monday 26th November at 6.30 pm
Fondation d'entreprise Ricard
12 rue Boissy d’Anglas Paris
Open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 am to 7 pm - free entrance.
Admission free