Espace Meyer Zafra in Paris is showing "Matter Before Name" (La matière avant le nom), a presentation organized with Galerie Philia that sets contemporary design, ceramics and painting side by side in the form of an imagined collector's interior. First presented for Paris Design Week, it runs from September 10 to December 23, 2026, and was conceived by Ygaël Attali and Héloïse Zinger.
The starting point, according to the organizers, is the moment when everyday categories begin to slip. A chair, a table, a vase or a painting each seems at first to have a fixed name, purpose and place; the exhibition sets out to unsettle those certainties. Works by the design studio Kar and the ceramicist Louise Traon are placed alongside works by Manuel Mérida, Francisco Salazar and Anaïs Vindel, so that each keeps its own identity while echoes of material, volume and presence emerge between them.
Kar's fiberglass pieces from its Formless collection remain usable furniture, yet their irregular, fluid surfaces recall rock, clay or matter slowly reshaped by time, leaving them on the edge of sculpture. Traon's glazed stoneware returns the idea to the earth: wild clays, ash, granite and chalk directly shape the forms and colors of her pieces, in a process the hand can never fully control. In the installation, Kar furniture is paired with Salazar's "Dématérialisation" works, with Vindel's "Inflorescence" and with Mérida's "Cercle Terre de Sienne."
For Art Basel Paris in October, the gallery has extended the presentation. A large tapestry from Andy Warhol's Oxidation series, based on his Oxidation Paintings of 1978, translates into textile the shimmering metallic surfaces and chance-driven compositions Warhol produced by letting copper pigments react with acidic substances. Paintings by Roberto Platé, in which broad fields of color and subtle shifts of surface create a sense of depth, join the display.
The gallery notes a historical link between the artists: Platé exhibited alongside Warhol in 1969, and Mérida followed in 1971. More than fifty years later, their work meets again in a setting that brings art, design and objects into conversation.
