Vie des formes — Lafayette Anticipations
With Vie des formes, Lafayette Anticipations orchestrates a compelling encounter between art and design, bringing formal intentions into dialogue with reflections on the nature of the object, as well as on the ways in which we engage with and use it.
Borrowing its title from Henri Focillon’s seminal book, the exhibition sets out to explore the porous boundaries between art and design, grounding its scenography in the relational dimension of works and their entanglement with reality, with our uses, and, above all, with our ethical concerns.
As with so many attempts by cultural institutions over the past two decades, and with the frustrated ambitions of a market that has never quite succeeded in forging a meaningful connection between contemporary art and design, the exhibition as a whole is marked by a certain imbalance. Yet this is largely forgivable. The particularly astute selection of works from the collection, including remarkable pieces by Gaëlle Choisne, Katinka Bock, Étienne Bossut, Mathieu Mercier and Ève Gabriel Chabanon, reveals the limits of design’s serial logic, even as these works manage to challenge the very repetition inherent to industrial production.
The exhibition remains thoroughly engaging, occasionally yielding striking surprises, particularly through the diversity of its materials, their irreducible heterogeneity, and the sustained reflection they provoke on the creator’s responsibility.
Above all, however, the exhibition gives rise to an irresistible tactile pull. Everything seems to invite touch, to be felt. This rather unexpected dimension brings to the fore the intrinsic value of matter, its transformation and its potential, turning the exhibition into an intriguing variation in which, faced with the object’s function and the imperatives of functionality, the fictions of desire and imagination derail expectations and continue to assert their own laws.
Vie des formes, September 8th to 13th, Lafayette Anticipations, 9 rue du Plâtre, 75004 Paris, free admission.
