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20/10/2006

Mathieu Mercier

Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris

At the time when Mathieu Mercier was preparing for this exhibition, there was a Dan Flavin retrospective in the Muse'e Art Moderne where one can find a work on paper entitled “Gray Juan in Paris (farewell Picabia)" 1960 - 1962. With this magnificent title, the young Gray Juan declared his artistic heritage and proclaimed his aesthetic orientation. " Fantasmatic surrealism is dead! Long live the literality of the daily objects!"

Mathieu Mercier can itemise all the pieces he considers for this exhibition. A number of the pieces are already produced, some others were exhibited recently yet some others are to be produce. Mathieu Mercier is dispose "of a mental stock". He imagines, organises in different ways to make ascertain the combination of pieces for the exhibition, that is to say a mis-en-scene that which the public is invited to participate and explore.

While Mathieu Mercier makes reference to art, architecture, furniture, social practices.., his work is in effect the fruit of the combinations of different elements. Once combined or “doubled", the work becomes at once of something paradoxical: object-sculpture, art-design, history - life, authoritarian - ergonomic, etc. This past spring Mathieu Mercier presented a lasso like neon suspended on a black metal bar at the Notre Histoire exhibition at the Palace de Tokyo and at the La Force de l’Art exposition at the Grand Palais. The neon acts as a paradox of form curls neon) as well as a redoubling of a luminous signage. As an object, it is conducive to various interpretations.

It is not haphazard that this exhibition here at the Galerie Chez Valentin appropriates the different test cards from Rorschach. (The Rorschach test: a patient is invited to glimpse and describe splotches of black or color ink on cards.) Mathieu Mercier created a video where images of Rorschach test like splotches morphing slowly from one card to another, from one "picture" to another. A slow psychedelic hypnosis substitutes the projective exercise and thereby diverting and weakening the functional effectiveness of the test. The result becomes a measure of the different degrees of the imaginary and of literality: the psychological examination becomes an occasion of rambling. It becomes deconstructive. In other words, opposites themselves are the suspicion of a concealed codification and the authority of a discipline in a work where forms grow and subside by their environment.

Another juxtaposition. A horizontal tube, a big white cube pierced through geometric forms, a board resting on a carpet. The usually sleek production from Mathieu Mercier to which we are accustomed to disappears. These precarious sculptures recall the “bricolage" or “do-it-yourself" clumsiness to which one might think of it as “jeunesse" or "young". But to which logic do they belong? What do they have in common? To which project do they participate in? We have on one side an aesthetic of work-site and other the implacable "white cube". Beyond this opposition regarding economy of production, these works propose a physical experience and a specific perceptive. The tube offers a vanishing point and an accelerated perspective due in part to its checkerboards motif. The "white cube" promises an inverse experience. Such is the mask for the body where you can enter and choose an opening by which to observe the fragmented exposition space.

Finally, a yellow board put on a blue carpet is as much a concrete assembly as a metaphor of a passage. So does all these works proceed to be experience only in opposite binaries? Much like the Rorschach test, all these works grow from the middle. The literality of the daily objects and fantasmatic surrealism! Or black, or white, they offer some a reflexive experience at the same time prove themselves to be real tools. The work of Mathieu Mercier functions as a mirror instrument reflecting the interpretational mechanism that we, as spectators, have put in place. It is for us to recognise this ideological force that underlies this mechanism.

Galerie Chez Valentin, 9 rue Saint-Gilles 75003 Paris

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