Mathieu Mercier – 1995, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022

Mathieu Mercier's work in part demonstrates an indecisive crossing of the avant-garde ambition to link art and industry, and the Duchampian act of bringing a manufactured object into the field of art, thus stripping it of any utilitarian value. Based on the appropriation of existing forms that must undergo a transformation, no matter how slight, it is fundamentally guided by the final capacity of an artwork to reconcile several layers of interpretation in a single form. In such a way, each artwork produced by Mercier can be understood as the summarized data of a problem that he has tackled for a long time without finding a definitive solution, and that he sets before the viewer with all the ambiguity of questions that remain unanswered.
– Marie Chênel

The window made entirely of synthetic glass, Untitled, 2007 (ill.1), seems to be a phoenix-like interpretation of the principles of transparent suburban architecture as applied by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. In it we can detect a wink at Marcel Duchamp’s La Bataille d'Austerlitz (ill. 2)[…]. These familiar references are part of the common basis of identification of the objects used by Mercier, but as references they are never enough per se. The meaning of the work is not exhausted in self-reference. The sole validity of the pieces lies in their propensity for linkage to much broader areas of cultural reference, and for fitting into a social and political space. Social relations no longer count as much as the individual's relationship with a landscape made up of all the forms already there, those of film, television, advertising, city-planning and architecture. Mercier takes as his point of departure this public-private space, and the common character of its forms.

Other couplings – the works in the Drum and Bass series, 2002 […] – lend substance, in their own way, to a kind of genealogy of current consumer products, going back to their avant-garde origins, and calling to mind, like a bout of anamnesis, the initial aspirations of the project to reconcile art and life, today led astray by the precepts of the culture industry.
– Vincent Pécoil

„It's that, for me, the explicit reference to works or artists of the past serve as a meeting point with the public. These references are present in the work because they are present in my life and most of the time in the lives of viewers. They're like a landmark, nothing less but also nothing more. A reference is never an end in itself; at the most it's the means to weave a link with the history of forms. For example, the Drum and Bass series is obviously a reference to Mondrian. Yet in the end that reference holds no more importance for me than the references linked to the present-day consumer objects making up the work.“
– Mathieu Mercier

Mercier is among those artists - there are not that many of them - who are nowadays linking the two spheres of production and consumption. For example […] he reconstructs an abstract work using standard consumer products; the pieces are no longer constructed from a raw material, but from a processed material. Mercier unites the two questions "What is to be done?" and "What to choose?" in a single piece, echoing a world where capitalism is less oriented at production than at the product, not so much processing raw materials as assembling ready-made products, according to the rule of "1+1=3" referred to by the artist.
– Vincent Pécoil

Marie Chênel, „Mechanics of Attention“, in: Mathieu Mercier Everything But The Kitchen Sink, Köln 2015, S. 11

Vincent Pécoil, „What is to be done? and what to choose?“, in: Mathieu Mercier ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris Sans Titres 1993-2007, Paris 2007, S. 54-59