from the archives

Excerpt from OSMOS Issue 11

MATHIEU MERCIER

By: Cay Sophie Rabinowitz

Mathieu Mercier’s work operates somewhat whimsically between Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary exegesis and Duchampian transubstantiation. His dialogical juxtaposition of visual systems and frameworks from art his- tory, design, and architecture indulges viewers the opportunity to question a common object’s potential for authenticity in times of evident over-production while contrarily conferring value back onto such objects.

For his “Pantone”series, Mercier scanned flowers from parks he frequents in Paris arranged next to Pantone color cards of a comparable palette. His foliage references a long history of the still life genre while the color cards wryly (and hyperbolically) point to a seductive yet insufficient function. Compared to an artist like Christopher Williams, for example, who is known for the inclusion of color calibration cards in his pictures, Mercier's form of rhetoric, namely, humor, may be less disciplined than Williams’ “productivist” implications. Unlike Williams’ careful referencing of the tools of photography, Mercier’s iteration of the extreme standardization and aggressive marketization of Pantone’s near-comprehensive Color Matching System does not “belong” to the medium of photography, but rather functions as a reference to the promise of Pantone to duplicate the value, and indeed emotive charge, of its natural referent.

In Sublimation (candle/chromatic circle J. Itten) (2011), for example, a store-bought candle contends with a sublimation print of the Itten color wheel. Presented on a pristine gallery pedestal, the abstract device cannot help but fall flat in comparison to the romantic flickering flame, yet it surreptitiously gains esoteric aura from the candle’s implied memento mori.

The oddity of a commodity form’s lifelessness is taken further in Le Nude (2013), Mercier’s 3D video of a naked woman on a pedestal, rotating on loop ad infinitum, not unlike Mark Leckey’s phantasmagorical version of a Koons bunny. The macro close-up shots of the woman’s flesh challenge the presumed superficiality of virtual space, however, eliciting an affective response in the viewer, whose reflection is in turn captured across the room on the surface of a mirror-polished metal helmet, hanging inconspicuously on the wall.

Mercier has been known to render installations and interventions that require extensive production but when finally installed can remain barely perceptible. Sometimes, this might be the result of the viewer being uninitiated, in other words, unaccustomed, to discern an extra column in the exhibition space or a bit of color surrounding a light switch as extraneous intervention. Similarly, one expects a soda can to have no other function but to dispense a beverage, and when it is displayed in a gallery vitrine, we call it art. But what other in-between functions might such an object imagine for itself: as a vehicle for some other material conditions or ideas? That re- shuffling of opportunities is what I have now come to expect from Mercier’s machinations. Looking back, I recall a few instances I believe worth sharing if only for the sake of celebration.

In 1998 I purchased from Galerie Mehdi Chourakri in Berlin a little five-inch ring— think flat cardboard donut—a stencil housed in an unassuming brown envelope. Certainly, I did not understand the potential it contained until Mercier rendered its result in my Berlin apartment while I was away on vacation. In advance of my departure, the artist came to get keys and some leftover paint I had been keeping under the sink. I came home from vacation to find that all of those conditions— the stencil, the light switch, and the leftover paint—were part of the work, which to this day remains fully executed in the form of a perfectly defined color circle around the light switch in my dining room.