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UNTITLED (BLU)
2014
Mathieu Mercier
Painting
230 x 215 cm
The acrylics on canvas with textile-inspiredmotifs reinterpret the main formal principles of modern painting, andparticularly, of parallel stripe painting.
The classical vocabulary used for thetriptych composition is disrupted by the varying thickness and format of theframes used. Their offset, quasi-rhythmic layouts confer a sculptural, evenobjectifying, value to the paintings.
While they readily invite to mentalprojection by calling on the viewer's visual memory and on their mixedrepresentations of modernity’s major abstractions, they also refer to a fieldthick with problematics, to a decorative potential claimed by Buren involvingthe dialogical complexities of form and object.
Paintings on canvas are rare, but notunheard of in Mathieu Mercier's work. An earlier set of kaleidoscopic tondiwhich breaks down the image of a diamond revealed, to the critical mind, theartificiality of certain pictorial codes.
The new series also, and especially, recallsthe recent photographic Scans series in its historical references and thetraditional reflexes of pictorial analysis it deliberately brings into play.
Lives and works in Paris.
Mathieu Mercier put on an exhibition at the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 2007. In 2003, he was awarded the Marcel Duchamp prize.
The valueof objects and their relationships with architecture and design is a constanttheme in Mathieu Mercier's work and he frequently uses common household objectsand fixtures that have economic or practical value. Mathieu Mercier's work is acritical eye on society, intended to question the relationship between objectand modernity. What is an object's place in contemporary aesthetics?
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