Dominique Mercadal

"Time does not pass but is overlapping", says Dominique Mercadal whose enamelled stoneware, accumulated strata that she striates or stamps, softens everything. She works on them in series and on the plate, a sort of template or sewing pattern, no doubt in memory of her first textile creations. Everywhere, graphic motifs saturate the surface which undulates and takes familial shapes: cloud, tree, wave... Dominique Mercadal's "faux-unis" deceive the eye which believes to see in these "pixelated" volumes colored of sand or soot, the pretty things that nature produces. Thus, these solitary sheeps riddled with dots, that one would think escaped from a Seurat painting, or these mountains, round-bosses dug with furrows like the Cairn of Gavrinis, syntheses between a plowed field and a Zen garden. The climate, a priori mild, is in crisis, and the catastrophe approaches: tsunami, charred trunk, mudslide.... In dreams or in real life, Dominique Mercadal comes across threatened landscapes. Her large dry basins attest to this: their source has dried up and on the stone, only the ripples remain of the water that once cascaded. For every void, there is a fullness in these clear and obscure pieces, "mounted" slowly, by chance or accident, so unpredictable is their material. Placed flat or on the wall, they are lands of contrasts.

Virginie Huet