Théo Mercier — Galerie Mor Charpentier, Paris
Striking in its conceptual precision and serene in its beauty, Théo Mercier’s new exhibition at Galerie Mor Charpentier immediately captivates through its visual power and symbolic intensity.
Presented frontally, the display levels out temporalities and geographies, bringing together a gallery of antique portraits drawn from diverse cultural traditions and eras, all bound by the same invisible trace: the slow and obstinate passage of snails that populate—if not colonize—them in turn. These gastropods, made from real shells combined with 3D-printed bodies, crawl across faces, pedestals, and even along the walls of the space, weaving each visage and each form into a shared dynamic that strangely unites them, frozen as they are by history and by their involuntary displacement.
With the air of a sculptural theater, the installation—while immediately accessible—blurs the boundaries between museographic display and clinical observation, feeding a fertile ambiguity between conservation and contamination… between stillness and life. A new fragility emerges: once fixed in their sacrality, the statues now reveal an involuntary emotion, an affecting stoicism under the trial of the snail’s kiss. The exhibition title, I Swallow Your Tears, further suggests an intimate and emotional dimension, where the faces appear literally inhabited by a mute sadness, while each individual work carries the more generic title of Snail Machine.
An ultimate paradox turns the intrusion of the animal into a gesture of care, as much as a natural retribution for the regrets of the past. The exhibition thus opens itself to interpretation without ever relinquishing its reflexive depth. It compels us to reconsider the permanence of artworks, their power of incarnation, and the cost of their existence—what the shaping of imagination through creation may have withdrawn from the world as much as what it has given back.
Théo Mercier, I Swallow Your Tears, Galerie Mor Charpentier, September 6 — October 2, 2025 — Learn more
