In 2015, Théo Mercier created the Idols of the Global Village series. Living between Paris and Mexico City, he brings to life a tribe of syncretic sculptures that reflect his growing interest in the tourism industry, geopolitics and questions of cultural appropriation. Somewhere between animal and human, masculine and feminine, primordial and futuristic, handmade and made in China, blessed and damned, the members of this family of totems are singularly renegotiated by the artist in a turmoil of gender, identity and commercial values.

Behind the religious authority of some of her pseudo-idols, a grimace or a wink simultaneously suggests the presence of an underlying voodoo power and the absence of veracity. By taking up tribal aesthetics, Théo Mercier reveals the humor and dark beauty that fuel discourse on individual and collective identity.

Incorporating spiritual and secular objects found in Mexico City, some of the sculptures are also the fruit of an eye and inspiration stimulated by the discovery of a new culture. Sourced from the ruins of a collapsed colonial house in Mexico City, the timber on which this series of idols is based was carved on a wheel – a process reminiscent of traditional ceramics. In a vertical assemblage, these naively cheerful-looking multicultural idols display a combination of rotation, collapse and reconstruction. A composite vision that refers to the transformation processes carried out by cultural enterprises.