Théo Mercier Is in Search of Time

LONDON — Frieze London is a melting pot of art and Théo Mercier, the French sculptor and stage director, is adding his own ingredients to the fair.

He’s brought three of his sculptures to the fair with the French art gallery Mor Charpentier and each piece touches on ideas of juxtaposition with the use of different materials.

“The three works are about collaging different time periods, mediums and imaginations — they are like meetings between objects that were never supposed to meet, some kind of impossible relationship,” Mercier said in an interview, referring to the contrast in the pieces.

He created “Time Trap” especially for the fair, where the head of a statue that resembles a Greek figure is laid between two pieces of stone that are held together by a rope, which also has a marble ball attached to it.

“I called it ‘Time Trap’ because stones are trapped in time and tell a history, but then again a museum is also a time trap. I’m really interested in that idea of when and where do we decide to stop time and the action of time — in this piece there’s an uncertainty of what the future is,” said Mercier, explaining that he wanted to merge art history with the act of catastrophes.

In “Time to Get Stone,” the artist had fun with the name, but there’s an underlying deepness to it. The sculpture is three cartons of eggs layered on top of each other with three pieces of stone stacked on top.

“[The name] is about smoking some pot or taking some acids, where there’s visions of eggs on a wall with stones on top of it, but it’s also looking at survival kits and preparing for winter somehow by getting stones, making a fire to cook eggs,” Mercier said.

The third sculpture, “Amour sans organes VIII,” translates to “love without organs,” where a human silicone hand is poking out of a shell. The name is a nod to the French artist Antonin Artaud, who came up with the term “body without organs,” a concept that says the human body reaches its true freedom when without organs.

Mercier is a deep thinker and his practice follows suit without any compromises. There’s a continuation of skewing perceptions. 

At last year’s fair, his work “Mirror Error” fused images of ancient Greek sculptures with a small mirror window. The work invited people to look at themselves and to reflect on the past and present through the images of gods and goddesses that possess the archetypes of beauty, strength and power.

“I use objects and references that are more or less recognized and I put them in situations or scenarios that we’ve never seen them in before — it’s about creating another reality, where these objects have a [relationship] with history or nature,” said Mercier, who is currently touring his performance-only work, “Skinless,” which use 80 metric tons of compressed waste from each visiting city as a stage.

The project is the artist’s way of looking at the idea of love. The compressed empty bottles and plastic bags in the performance are a parallel representation of temporary desire.

“[Love is] the engine of a lot of things. I didn’t want to make something too dark and hopeless in this really devastating landscape. In this broken world we’re all living in, we know that we broke it and f–ked it up, but we [must] keep on having fun and making love, babies, parties and friends,” he told WWD earlier this year.