Ping Pong, Quiz & Domino, Bertrand Lavier, Mathieu Mercier

Albarrán Bourdais presents “Ping Pong, Quiz & Domino”, a two-person exhibition by Bertrand Lavier and Mathieu Mercier, bringing together two key figures of contemporary French art in a dialogue centered on the status of the object, systems of representation, and the legacy of modernism.

Through distinct yet deeply aligned formal languages, both artists have developed practices that challenge the hierarchies determining the value and meaning of things. Positioned between art and everyday life, their works operate through displacement, appropriation, and reconfiguration, destabilizing traditional categories and situating the object within a field of tension between functionality, representation, and aesthetic autonomy.

The exhibition revisits an exchange initiated in 2018 at the gallery Massimo Minini, reactivating an artistic conversation that unfolds here as an open system of correspondences. This principle not only structures the conceptual framework of the project but also informs its spatial arrangement: works are presented in pairs, creating a parcours based on relationships, contrasts, and affinities that invite an active reading by the viewer.

The title “Ping Pong, Quiz & Domino” refers to different modes of play and association—rebound, questioning, concatenation—that shape the internal logic of the exhibition. Each encounter between works presents an open “quiz,” while the succession of these relationships generates a domino effect in which meanings unfold, shift, and transform throughout the exhibition.

Among the works on view, the iconic Bocca by Bertrand Lavier—the red lip-shaped sofa designed by Studio 65, itself derived from the iconography of Salvador Dalí—appears integrated into one of his characteristic “superimposed objects.” In these works, Lavier combines unaltered consumer artifacts—such as refrigerators, freezers, or sofas—to produce unexpected associations that function as true visual equations. Far from arbitrary, these juxtapositions follow a precise concordance of form, scale, proportion, and color, bringing the realm of the everyday object and that of the artwork onto the same plane.

By contrast, Last Day Bed by Mathieu Mercier introduces a radically different presence. Carved in marble, the piece references the modern daybed associated with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, evoking both the history of design and the tradition of minimalist sculpture. Yet this reference is destabilized by a fundamental ambiguity: the work oscillates between bed, psychoanalytic couch, and tomb. This “monumental piece of furniture,” charged with both physical and symbolic weight, transforms a familiar object into a space of mental projection, where notions of rest, desire, memory, and finitude intersect.

In both cases, albeit through different strategies, the artists activate a displacement of the object that challenges its function and meaning. Through appropriation, minimal transformation, or unexpected associations, Lavier and Mercier position the everyday within an unstable territory, where categories of use, representation, and value become porous.

Within this context, Bertrand Lavier’s work—known for its operations of superposition and displacement—resonates with that of Mathieu Mercier, whose practice has focused on the languages of design, modernity, and their codes. If Lavier constructs a kind of visual encyclopedia from existing objects, Mercier interrogates the systems that organize our relationship to them, placing them in an intermediate space between function and form, industry and art.

Through this system of correspondences, the exhibition unfolds as a space in which objects, decontextualized and rearticulated, activate a field of resonance between the everyday and the artistic. Each encounter becomes a point of tension and reflection, inviting the viewer to actively participate in the construction of meaning.