Skin after skin, molt after molt, Théo Mercier moves. It mutates, and moves the lines. At 40, the cliché of “little prince of the plastic arts” still sticks to his skin. But, in recent years, it is as a director that he has found a second recognition. Director of what, exactly? His shows, Radio Vinci Park has Outremonde passing through Affordable Solution for Better Livingrelate neither to theater, nor to dance, nor even to performance, a catch-all word now used to classify the unclassifiable of contemporary creation. Skinlesswhich he presents at La Villette as part of the Autumn Festival, continues this escape from manufactured boxes like Ikea shelves, which were the heroines of one of his shows.
What then? Is it so important? “I’m just looking for a place “between”immediately poses Théo Mercier in what he calls his “cat tree” de Belleville, in Paris, a space full of nooks and crannies. Places that come to hack our habits of making, looking at, consuming culture. At first, I didn’t necessarily want to be an artist. I knew the object interested me, and I went to industrial design school. In this field, we do not create objects for their own sake, but so that they have a relationship with the individual. There is a use, and in this use, there is a choreography. A phantom body lurks through the drawing of a table or a cup. Afterwards, when I began my practice of sculpture, I was always interested in the aura of things, in the living part of the inanimate, its vibration, its ghost also in the distance. Very quickly my work began to play with movement, to want to emancipate itself from its inanimate status. I worked a lot around this kind of choreography to be done through the gaze, the ghost dance of things. »
The transition from the “inanimate” (an improper word for him) to the animated took place imperceptibly, especially since Théo Mercier has for twenty years been an assiduous spectator of everything that the contemporary scene offers that is most stimulating. “This scene has always interested me more than that of the plastic arts, he admits. Creators like Gisèle Vienne, Phia Ménard, Philippe Quesne, Jan Martens, François Chaignaud, with whom I created Radio Vinci Parkand above all Romeo Castellucci, had a fundamental role. They are artists who offer particular sensory and temporal experiences, creators of worlds. They magnetized me. I wanted to bring together the respective strength of these temples and these rituals that are the museum and the theater, to create movement in these two places, and to mix the white magic of one and the magic black on the other. »
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