Dear Shaded Viewers,
“Dreams Wide Open” While the city sleeps and its inhabitants are deep into their dreams…Théo Mercier has pulled us into his world, to dream with abandon. The amount of time we leave our waking hours to sleep equals one day out of three, that is if you are able to get that much sleep.
“To dream means to abandon the security that our body offers us: that of being physically different from what we see or imagine. To dream is to be identical to the bird that we observe, to the chair that supports us, to the meal that we are about to eat, to the shadow that stalks us: to expose ourselves as much as possible to the power and risk of the imagination. It is for this reason that OUTREMONDE is made of the very material of the city we inhabit, capable of taking on all its forms, including most obscure: it is a question of making dreams our city.”
“It is not only an archaeological gesture; it is also an invitation to think about another possible future of the city, in which the dream builds the streets, the road the houses. Moreover, within these works, it’s not just Paris that becomes a huge bed in which reality turns in a dream. The whole planet is invited to sleep in these beds and to merge in a cathedral of shared sleep. Rather than dreaming with our eyes wide open, we should learn to live moment by moment, “dreams wide open”.
Théo Mercier has often been called the Prince of Contemporary Art and the title certainly him. I had the opportunity to work with him back in 2009 and have attended all his exhibitions in Paris ever since. I fell in love with the Loner back in 2010. A few words that define his art for me are poetry, tenderness, emotion and a large dose of humour.
Imagine for a moment that Théo Mercier spent the last five weeks practically living in la Conciergerie working with tons of sand and creating this dreamscape, all that work can never be moved to another space, it is made out of sand so when the exhibition is over, in a truly eco-friendly way, the sand will be returned to where it came from and all this magic will just disappear.
