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Deja vu

Mathieu Mercier

Nonetheless, the artist never abandons a discrete and redeeming sense of humor, which makes him explicitly cite Mondrian and Haim Seinbach as he tries to reconcile the museum and the department store in his recent Drum and Bass series (2002) - a grid of black shelves that hold a yellow garden hose, a red plastic toolbox, and blue binders. It is as if the basement shelves of a family house were suddenly given the added value of ''work of art''.

Form - Specific, Moderna Galerija, Ljublijana, 2003. Pascal Beausse. Catalogue

Ses productions hybrides et autonomes se jouent des catégories. Elles construisent dans des assemblages singuliers de nouvelles cohérences (une étagère Mondrian faite d'objets de consommation de masse...).

Suite française, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienne, Autriche, 2007. Auteur : H. Dimaide. Catalogue

[...] une exposition examinant les rémanences du projet avant-gardiste dans la création contemporaine [...]. La pratique de la reprise concrétise idéalement l'aporie de l'art. La réutilisation symbolique de pans entiers de la culture au sein d'un phénomène entropique se nourrissant sans cesse des multiples occurrences d'une même idée, contribue largement à définir l'art comme un processus constant d'update de la culture par elle-même.

Le syndrome de Broadway, Parc Saint-Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux, 2007. Le Commissariat.

Mathieu Mercier makes art that mimics items available in design stores. His colorful Drum and Bass Bollinger consists of an asymmetrically arranged wall-mounted black shelving system on which Mercier has placed a large yellow plastic pale, a blue exercise mat (Bollinger brand, which explains the name "Bollinger" in the work's title), and a roll of red cloth, all of which are items you could find at a local store. [...] Mercier is particularly interested in using affordable products in his works. The asymmetrical black lines, primary colors, and reductive aesthetic in Drum and Bass Bollinger recall the paintings of Piet Mondrian, the twentieth-century abstract artist who reduced the compositional elements of a painting to rectilinear black lines against a white ground, often with blocks of primary colors. Mercier's allusions here to both painting and commerce wittily diminish the gap between art and everyday life, conveying a serious idea simply by making use of the kind of objects we find all around us. In essence, he dissolves the distinction between fine and applied arts by transforming these objects into art on the wall.

Return to Function, MMoCA, Madison, 2009. « A Return to Function », Jane Simon. Catalogue

With his work group Drum and Bass Mathieu Mercier paraphrases a geometric/pictorial composition principle that was developed by Piet Mondrian in the early 1920s and was based on black lines as well as the primary colors blue, red and yellow. Mondrian endeavored to create the idea of universal harmony in this way. Mercier transforms Mondrian's compositions into three dimensional shapes by arranging trivial items on shelves. However, Mercier's arrangements return the individual emotional arbitrariness castigated by Mondrian back to art - color and shape, defined by functional objects on the part of Mercier, are permitted as subjective carriers of emotions. The work's title, Drum and Bass 2, serving at the same time as a label for an extremely innovative form of techno music in the 1990s, conjures up associations with Mondrian's magnificent late works - Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Victory Boogie-Woogie - which he created after he had emigrated to the USA.

Private/Corporate, Daimler Art Collection, Berlin, 2002. Auteur : Rudolf Scheutle.