lange + pult, Zurich
Mathieu Mercier
Mathieu Mercier’s project for Art-o-rama consists in gathering a set of emblematic pieces and proposes an immersion in his artistic approach. The works, made up of compositions of common objects, find a resonance in the formal vocabulary of modern art. Works listed in an everyday universe (bottle, ashtray, color chart, tie etc…) but whose shift operated by the artist forces us to reconsider the codes of interpretation of the signs which separate the representations of the reality from the abstraction.
Lamps, furniture, bicycles, letterpresses, museum pedestals: Mathieu Mercier’s artistic production masterfully moves back and forth between the categories of art and everyday culture. Situated in the dynamic field of architecture, design and visual arts, it reflects on the fundamental ideas of 20th century Western culture, particularly the concept of modernism.
It constantly refers to the artistic avant-garde, and makes connections to their gestures and pictorial inventions by deliberately displacing seemingly ordinary objects from the contemporary world. In a constant exchange between high and low, Mercier enigmatically poses the question of the status of objects oscillating between functionality and artistic freedom in relation to practical use. Mathieu Mercier was born in 1970 in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, France, and lives and works in Paris and Valence. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions and has been shown in major museums around the world since the late 1990s.
