Since the mid-1990s the French artist Mathieu Mercier, who received the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2003, has developed his sculptural practice with a richness of theoretical and formalist obsessions. Some have been commented on extensively. That his work focuses mainly on the status of the everyday object has been particularly emphasized. Or that he exemplifies the unresolved junction between the avantgarde's ambition to unite art and industry on the one hand and a Duchampian act on the other, subtracting any utility value of manufactured objects by transferring them into the art sphere. Conversely, other aspects of his work have received less attention. Some of them seem to surprise us suddenly and, as a paradox, do so again and again. Often, however, the pursuit is the confrontation with a particular interest, with a reflective questioning in combination with sculptural research, which has appeared as in an inversion in several past works. Already there; manifest. Incidentally this is one of the characteristic features of Mathieu Mercier's approach: that he constantly evades the attributions that one might wish to apply to him while simultaneously creating work that is, in its entirety, absolutely remarkable for its conceptual coherence, and has been so since its beginnings.

In this respect, the presence of the human body (and beyond that, of specimens of the animated world) is undoubtedly one of the most obscure topics in the reception of Mathieu Mercier's work – a blind spot. Moreover, the ludic dimension of many of his works remains far too frequently unmentioned, which also applies to the lack of acknowledgement of the sense of humour that the artist repeatedly displays in his relation to reality. Let us take two photos presented at the Medhi Chouakri Gallery as an example. The first one, untitled, is part of a photo series named Test. The images play with the spatial arrangement of notebooks and various paper blocks in vivid colours, bought in office-supply stores. Left as purchased, these samples are arrayed in an abstract geometric composition, generally located in a corner of the room as a distant reminiscence of the iconic hanging of the Suprematist works of Malevich at the exhibition 0,10 (1915). The second photo, again untitled, displays a female nude and is similarly part of another ongoing series. Contrary to the great classics of Western art history, this young, reclined body suggests not the slightest erotism: the armpits hide the facial features, the breast is squashed. Employing close-ups and unconventional viewpoints, he raises the issue of depicting female nudity in a world overly saturated with it. The relationship to the body appears absolutely concrete here: the quest is for an unconditional vision and the ultimate point of sharpness. Like a scientific investigation, the curious observation of anatomical contours sets them up as landscapes or even as still life.

While he regularly invokes high-art references for their artistic power and their potential to serve as a meeting point with the visitor, Mathieu Mercier also ensures that each of his works retains an invigorating tension between its constituting elements, provoking unsuspected resurgences outside the art space. Beyond the exhibition forum, the artist focuses on the relationships that the individual entertains with the forms appearing in his or her immediate environment, as well as on what they do not (or no longer) see in (or between) these forms. The resort to reality in the sense of a repertoire entails a critical reflection on habit – just as Stendhal demanded – in order to elude its automatisms. His practice is rooted in a quest for forms of abstraction in familiar objects, involving a permanently open mind vis-à-vis the world. This unfolds along two trajectories. Such is the case with his work with a bicycle veiled by a dust cover that displays a silkscreen print of a freely drawn line. This line runs in loops, just like a doodle jotted mechanically in a moment of boredom with the wish to escape the present. His words commenting the work: "I contemplate abstractions, and I add real things to them, mixing perceptions, games and pleasure." The bicycle is the artist’s favourite way to get about, which he associates with an escape from childhood and yet the constant memory of it too, while also revealing "a wonderful composition of triangles and circles in movement … like a genuine Picabia." Moreover, a bike is one of the last everyday objects whose mechanics and functioning are entirely visible. In fact what Mercier reveals by shrouding his "autonomous machine" is the self-evidence of a familiar object no longer questioned. It is an optical puzzle, yet anything but an illusion, and so a possible response to the question, as raised by Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects, as to "how objects are experienced, what needs other than functional ones they answer, what mental structures are interwoven with … their functional structures", and "what cultural … system underpins their directly experienced everydayness"?

–– Marie Chênel

Translation: Lena Maria Dreher

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