Mathieu Mercier — Sublimations — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 20 → March 25, 2012

Entretien — Mathieu Mercier Rencontre avec Mathieu Mercier pour sa nouvelle exposition au Crédac d’Ivry du 20 janvier au 25 mars. L’artiste nous explique ses dernières productions et son attraction pour le formalisme.

For his first show in France following his 2007 retros- pective at the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Mathieu Mercier has assembled for the Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — le Crédac a group of recent works that includes several that have never been shown previously.

An uncertain cross between the avant-gardes’ project of imbuing the artistic object with practical value, and the Duchampian gesture of lending symbolic value to the object of everyday use, Mercier’s work is endlessly redefining the production modalities of objects and their passage in the field of art.

A series of printed white pedestals associates objects having an everyday use with images of measuring tools that are slightly distorted and imprinted directly on these bases. Bananas, for instance, are displayed side by side with a curved color chart, while the image of an exploded chromatic circle is featured with a vase. Selected with great precision, these compositions suggest multiple associations of ideas. Both object and image, they simultaneously assert their materiality and their representational nature, and seem above all to sum- mon the use of our eye and our attention to reality.

In another gallery, a bike, a bench made up of sections of water pipe and an updated, oversized light fixture from the 1950s conjure up an urban scene. Playing on the transformation of standards, this setting reformulates our relationship to the outside world and our way of understanding the forms all around us.

Elsewhere, in a darkened gallery, a diorama, that outmoded system of display, a kind of grand showcase inheri- ted from natural history museums of old, harbors a pair of live axolotls. These animals seem frozen at an inter- mediary representation of evolution, between water and earth, and the elementary setting around them forces us to face our own archaisms in terms of representation.