With what imaginary powers does our time govern, and how can we manage to identify its threads?
Théo Mercier tries to answer this question by hurling a rain of cars onto the courtyard of Villa Medici — some with their doors open, as if they were technological birds crashing to the ground, suddenly and unpredictably completing their life course. He does the same with bronze chairs that seem to melt, stretch, and deform in an enigmatic and inexplicable way.
In the ancient dark and damp cistern, a series of used and worn household appliances emit a faint light, revealing the statue of Narcissus reflected in a small pool of water, accompanied by the sound of falling drops.
Heads, fragments of statues tied with ropes to other disused appliances.
A series of art fragments — domestic and technological objects assembled and bound together as past, present, and future are — with nothing to distinguish them by value, identity, or history.
Chaos reigns, as the French artist asserts, returning after ten years to Villa Medici in the bad timing of BAD TIMING. Chaos, which has multiple faces, together with order, has been traversed over time by the most eclectic artistic speculations.
Above all, it is the chaos of the Nietzschean Dionysian spirit — representing irrationality, darkness, but also creativity in its eccentric mode of relating to reality.
After all, between an ordered chaos and a chaotic order there is not much difference, because reality reveals itself in their intersection — as Mercier's art juxtaposes, intersects, confuses, binds, negates, deforms, and points toward.
Théo Mercier was born in Paris in 1984 and lives between Paris and Marseille. Claiming formal freedom, he works to deconstruct the mechanisms of history, objects, and representations in which he finds harmonious contradictions. Explorer, collector, and artist, he conducts a reflection at the crossroads of anthropology, geopolitics, and tourism. The result is a vast corpus of works populated by dystopian myths and iconoclastic sculptures in which past, present, and future, life and death, craftsmanship and industry, profane and sacred, reality and fiction clash in an orderly cacophony.
Already a fellow of Villa Medici and a candidate for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2014, Théo Mercier has mounted solo exhibitions at the Conciergerie in Paris, the Luma Westbau Foundation (Zurich), the Collection Lambert (Avignon), the El Eco Museum (Mexico City), the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris), the [mac] Musée d'art contemporain (Marseille), the Lieu Unique (Nantes), and the Tri Postal (Lille).
Moving from the "white cube" to the "black box," Théo Mercier has staged Du futur faisons table rase (2014), Radio Vinci Park (written with François Chaignaud, 2016), La Fille du collectionneur (2017), Affordable Solution for Better Living (written with Steven Michel, 2018) — for which they received the Silver Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale — BIG SISTERS (co-written with Steven Michel, 2020), and OUTREMONDE, a series of living landscapes around childhood and the imaginary of sand, created between 2021 and 2022. His work has been presented at Nanterre-Amandiers, the Festival d'Automne, the Ménagerie de verre, the Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Festival d'Avignon, among others. He represented the French Pavilion at the Prague Quadrennial in 2023 with his collaborator Céline Peychet.
BAD TIMING | Théo Mercier Exhibition
Exhibition: June 10 – September 25, 2023
Performance NECROTEMPO: September 9 and 10, 2023
Opening hours: Monday to Sunday, 10:00–18:30 (closed Tuesdays). Annual closing December 25.
Note: the historic spaces of Villa Medici are accessible only with a guided tour. Exhibition spaces may be visited independently.
