Mathieu Mercier
27 Nov 2012 - 12 Jan 2013
MATHIEU MERCIER
27 November 2012 - 12 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.
27 November 2012 - 12 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.