“Takis: Magnetic Fields”

Pulled toward electromagnets yet restrained by wires, the suspended metal cones and needles of Takis’s “Télésculptures” seem to quiver with absurd and frustrated desire.The Greek artist settled in France in 1954 and, with sculptures involving magnetism, light, and sound, became a leading figure in the kinetic art movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Now, twenty-two years after his last major retrospective, the Palais de Tokyo offers a welcome opportunity to reassess Takis’s work at a moment when contemporaries such as Lygia Clark and the German postwar group Zero are

print May 2013

Gianni Colombo

A furtive press on one of the metal levers at the bottom of Gianni Colombo’s Superficie in Variazione (Surface in Variation), 1959, would have rewarded you with an uncanny displacement of your touch: a dimple appearing on a shaggy white surface in tandem with the pressure of your finger. In a contemporary culture awash with exhortations to participate, such a simple interactive device could easily be regarded as a technocratic instrumentalization of the viewer. But leavened by Colombo’s characteristic playfulness, the work’s strange dissociation of the visual and tactile is also acutely visceral.