Opening November 10, 19:00 h
Gallery Weekend CDMX
10.11.17 – 13.01.18
Phantom Legacy is the first solo exhibition in Mexico by artist Theo Mercier presenting the production made during his residence in MARSO in 2017. Mercier’s artistic practice is based on a meticulous collection of objects, selected from their material and symbolic qualities reorganized and presented in montages that communicate the implied stories underlying each one of them:
As you walk through Theo’s atelier, one glimpses on one side an anthropomorphic mortar with cracks that simulate its genitals, a head-shaped rock as the representation of a capricious deity that has to be complimented with a feast of delicacies on his skull to ensure his sympathy and protection or the vestige of a tire accompanied by a rather ironic note that recites “Le monde serait moins moche” (the world will be less deplorable).
His most recent works incorporate local and organic materials and forms from which an intentionally homogenous vision of “primitive” art emanates with a humor between lines. Their montages relate layers of everyday objects with the immaterial superposition of an anthropological imaginary.
The work of Mercier seeks to question the function and aesthetics of the current symbols, extending to the rituals constituted by gestures and objects endowed with personal values. Thus Mercier builds a sort of contemporary archaeological legacy from the dislocation and the bond between vernacular and industrial elements.
