Théo Mercier is a master in creating precarious balances and paradoxical relationships of scale. In his first solo exhibition at the gallery BUGADA & CARGNEL, the artist takes us on a joyful journey through history from the ancient times to modern civilization. He does so by decostructing and reassembling what we perceive as the past and the present into a series of sophisticated hybrids. The exhibition consists of an heterogeneous landscape of objects and sculptures, conceptual installations that gather together rough materials, antique vases, 18th-century ceramics, masks and artifacts, stone cannonballs, a tire. Architectural elements meet Mesopotamian ruins and modern pop art, pushing the viewer’s imagination to dream big, and drift among Romantic suggestions and metropolitan spleen, with a dash of playful surrealism.
The show is finely curated, intriguing and easy to access by mind and spirit. THÉO MERCIER introduces the spectator to a “Babylonian and organized mise en scène of disaster” and steps into a soft collision of brick stonewalls, burning rubber, framed colorful prints, majestic colons, sharp lines and a colony of green spattered glass. Mercier eventually liberates the visitors mind, and suggest interstellar perceptions embodied in a great variety of pieces that simply blow you away.
