“LES CHOSES” (Things) is nothing if not ambitious. Curated by art historian Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, it arrives on the seventieth anniversary of a landmark exhibition at the nearby Musée de l’Orangerie, Charles Sterling’s “La nature morte: de l’antiquité au XXè siècle” (Still Life Painting: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century), and like Sterling’s show, it includes a blockbuster selection of still-life paintings in the European tradition, from northern market scenes and Spanish bodegónes to Post-Impressionist bouquets. Yet the present exhibition is less

The powdery, soft-toned Surrealist ceramic sculptures of Genesis Belanger round off with pillowy curves and blush with bubble-gum colors. Just what is it that makes her work so different, so appealing? Perhaps it’s how her carefully composed tableaux of modern life coalesce into bodies, while her bodies snap cleanly into objects. Despite the curling tongues and snaky fingers’ sensual allure, these chopped-up parts are so pristinely severed that it’s hard to imagine them as human forms at all, lacking as they do our wet-work anatomy’s particularly messy viscera. There’s a tender tension between