Sans titre, 2017

Mathieu Mercier   Emerging artists

Mathieu Mercier lives and works in Paris. He studied at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Bourges from 1989-1994, at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques in Paris in 1995 and at the Beaux-Arts in Nantes in 1997. In the tradition of Duchamp and Mondrian , Mathieu Mercier endeavors to detect and reveal the place of beauty in everyday objects. His multiple talents as a painter, sculptor, architect, and director have led him to work with objects from mass consumption that we all know but which are then perceived in an aesthetic and artistic way. Mathieu Mercier's work, heterogeneous, plays on the criteria that critical analyzes have used to describe it. Abstraction, objectivity, simulacrum, appropriation, readymades, diverted functionalism ... They are correct but their enumeration is part of a nomenclature that borders on the absurd. There are references to the human, natural and social sciences, it brings a new look at the object. Since the start of his career, Mathieu Mercier has been reflecting on the definition of the place of the object, both in the consumer industry and in the field of art. His research is reflected in a permanent questioning of the symbolic and utilitarian functions of objects.