A live in suspended domestic scenes.
25.09.2025Just imagine you are strolling through a neighbourhood in your city and suddenly you see a man reading at a bistro table with a bottle of wine floating on a white house wall. You would certainly have to look twice to understand what is going on here.
Well, the scenario is as real as it is bizarre. Because the multidisciplinary artist Thierry Mandon, living and working in Ardèche, France, casts himself as the subject of his satirical works. The online magazine Colossal writes: He “reads in a bed hazardously suspended feet above the ground or sips a glass of wine at a halved dining table.”
According to the magazine the humorous and discomforting pieces, titled “Inside-Outside” and “Tableau vivant”, respectively, unveil a series of slow, solitary activities that, once outdoors, become a performative spectacle rather than a mundane moment. They speak to Mandon’s “search for harmony and for a stable unity between humans and their environment”, he says, as he literally slices and adheres domestic objects to a building’s facade.
On his website the artist writes: “Thierry Mandon uses video, photography, performance and installation to capture the poetry of everyday life, making subtle transformations that reveal to the viewer the tragic and comic aspects of life.
Characters, representing archetypes of the individual, are placed in improbable, uncomfortable and absurd situations. They confront incompatible spaces and times, their human condition, their limitations, their weaknesses or their creative power.
These themes manifest themselves in works where two elements, two worlds, are often exposed in a precarious balance, seeking harmony or stable unity between man and his environment.”