Since finishing his studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Creation Industrielle in Paris and the Universitat der Kunste Berlin, Theo Mercier has already collaborated with Bernhard Willhelm, creating look books and invitations for Willhelm s runway show, worked in the New York atelier of Matthew Barney as well as showing in group shows in New York, Prague, Paris, Moscow and Riga.
ARTKABINETT social network of fine art collectors noticed his works at FIAC in Paris, and even enquired as to the chemical composition of his extruded creations.
Theo Mercier’s website is not easy to navigate, but it is a goldmine of surreal photographic art well worth a look. I have to say photographic art because his work includes collage, printing, painting and sculpture. He has worked for Dior Homme, Materio, Bernhard Willhelm, Frame, Matthew Barney and Terence Koh.
The multi-disciplinarian Theo Mercier is an artist, a sculptor, a painter, and a photographer. He uses his work to transmit the ironic magic of simple things revealing the aura living inside of them. An element that absolutely must exist within his art is humor.
He is also attracted by the extremely rich and dense topics of sex and death. “I like talking about death with a rotten cabbage and a missing tooth and to deal with sex with eggs and dirty socks. I like to inject those notions into objects that have nothing to do with sex or death, using, for instance, an innocent tea pot.” Said Mercier.
Recently Mercier turned 25 and he has already been the recipient of grants, awards and solo shows.
Even as a child Mercier was interested in collecting objects. He used to frequent flea markets with his mother and father and found himself drawn to strange items that had question marks living inside of them. The objects of desire were sometimes ugly, nasty, vicious or just plain boring.
After doing an internship last year with Matthew Barney in New York, Mercier understood that the length of the journey to becoming a master of creation was a long one and so he decided that it was important that he began his own very soon.
Mercier seduced his French gallerist, Gabrielle Maubrie, at the Salon Montrouge, with his Muslim punk carpets. She saw them and immediately offered him a solo show.
She also included his carpets at the Parisian art fair, FIAC where she sold two of them and exhibited his work in New York this past March at the Armory Show.
He is also represented in New York by Envoy Gallery. That was quite simple—he merely knocked at their door.
Recently, Mercier has a solo show at the Museée de la Chasse in Paris. Once you pull back the thick black curtains at the entrance, you enter the surreal world that only Mercier could create. Directly confronting you is a life size elephant with green lasers coming out of his head, a smoking head with hair and a totem of dentures and photos of flying fish.
The mood Mercier created was incredibly dark and mysterious. “I wanted to create a master of ceremony for the weak, weird and nasty creatures that I felt needed a daddy. So we built this enormous King of the Death Valley. Elephants are symbolic of power and massacre,” said Mercier. The strong and majestic elephant head is covered with wood spikes and urchins.
These painful ornaments create a prickled crown while the red pearl eyes cry blood and lasers create a stigmata between the elephant’s two eyes. “In the end we are facing a Christ-like figure, an animal sacrificed for the entire human race,” Mercier said.
Photographs on the wall of cosmic fish are part of a series of three cosmic ghosts (the dog, the man and the fish). Mercier’s idea was to create mystical and elegant pictures out of cheap images that he found via Google.
All in all, Mercier is an multi-hyphenate’s dark and dreamy visions balance a fine line of being both startlingly intense and dramatically beautiful.
