A completely delightful mental exercise was offered by the curatorial team Yoann Gourmel and Elodie Royer: Take an artist unjustly relegated to obscurity by art history because unassimilable to a particular medium or movement; revisit his multifarious oeuvre, measuring it by the yardstick of contemporary standards; then peer into the cracks thus opened to illuminate, by the light of a new day, many of today’s works and practices. This magic formula is that of “Le Sentiment des choses” (The Feeling of Things), the stunning “prospective retrospective” not so much of as around the work of artist and designer Bruno Munari, who was born in 1907 in Milan and passed away there in 1998. The brilliant inventor of many surreal treasures for daily use—talking forks, mobile sculptures, knitted lamps, unreadable books—Munari was also one of the pioneers of Concrete art and the author of books for children, many examples of which are included in the exhibition. “Munari has constantly eluded all forms of classification and, therefore, in a way, art history as a whole,” Royer explained in an interview for French public radio. “He’s turned curiosity into a method.”

Curiosity, the penchant for play and sharing, and the willingness to situate oneself at the margins of the art market, are also qualities that motivate the seventeen artists and collectives here gathered around this figure. Munari and his work served as a filter through which to (re)discover the performative furniture of artist and designer Martino Gamper (based in turn on works by Giò Ponti); the wall drawings, as beautiful as Japanese wallpaper, by Bruno Persat, which result from a series of arbitrated penalties (in which the ball, replaced by a truncated icosahedron, is projected onto a wall covered in charcoal); or a fragment of Mark Geffriaud’s imaginary house, for which he produces one of the architectural elements at each of his exhibitions (here, a stone step). In the midst of this merry band, Munari’s anachronistic contemporaries, a couple of “historical” artists were also examined: the ingenious Robert Filliou, seven of whose pieces were presented here, including a 1962 attraction, Danse poème aléatoire collectif (à performer deux par deux, chacun[e] tournant une roue) (Collective Shuffling poem dance [to perform two by two, each turning a wheel]), and one of the pioneers of mail art, Ray Johnson, another free electron orbiting at the margins of the Fluxus movement.

The title of the exhibition, which is a rough translation of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, manages to say a lot about the ambitions of these two young curators. For them, “the feeling of things” is what comes to us immediately in front of a work of art and allows us to weave a conceptual approach to it, whether at once or with some delay. “The affective, the felt are notions generally banished from the discourse on art,” Gourmel says. “We believe, on the contrary, that this could be used as a critical and theoretical tool to reflect on artistic practices that tend toward a dematerialization of the art object.” Taking their cue from Munari, they’ve made a good start.

—Claire Moulène

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.