RADI Design at Sandra Gering - New York - Recherche, Auto-production, Design Industriel - Brief Article

The French design group RADI (Recherche, Auto-production, Design Industriel) came together almost 10 years ago and have gotten considerable attention in Europe. For their first solo show in the U.S., the group (Florence Doleac, Laurent Massaloux, Olivier Sidet and Robert Stadler, all now in their 30s) filled Sandra Gering's small new Chelsea gallery with a densely installed assortment of objects ranging from strictly utilitarian to purely art. The gallery's big street-facing window, through which nearly the whole show was visible, emphasized the usually suppressed equivalence of art gallery and retail store.

Charm and invention abound in RADI's work. Their glazed white ceramic Robot is a domed cylinder studded with a vaguely anthropomorphic arrangement of loops and cups that serve as receptacles for fruits and condiments; an even more appealing (and abstract) round server has loops only. The svelte Do Cut is a ridged, wasp-waisted column that breaks apart in three places, to serve as vase, umbrella stand or stool. A cafe table sports its own water carafe and a flower-pot its own watering tools in the form of pointy-ended ceramic bulbs. The lines of these accessories are crisp, clean and generically postwar modern, though RADI also has an inclination toward Pop that sometimes brings its work dangerously close to cute, as in the acclaimed Whippet Bench, which has the profile of a dog (a version of this bench has appeared in Donna Karan's Madison Avenue store). Similarly, the group has designed inflatable garden furniture shaped like vegetables and a mug crowned with a chocolate-covered cookie modeled after a droplet-ringed splash of coffee (still in prototype).

A better visual joke is the big, adlike color photograph of a young woman seated amid RADI furniture and holding a hacksaw. The same saw--in fact, roughly the same arrangement of furniture--appeared in front of her in the gallery. This setup recalls the humor of pioneering Conceptualists like William Anastasi, as when he made a gallery's electrical socket and strip molding the subject of a painting that hung between them. But RADI flips Anastasi's question on its head, so that "is it art, or just something negligibly functional?" becomes "is it useful, or just art?" The symbolism isn't subtle--they chose, after all, a jagged-toothed blade to cut through art/design boundaries--but it is effective.

Another big-bore issue the show raises begins with the query, "if it's not just art, can we touch it?" The eroticism of consumer objects is refocused when the usual gallery prohibition against fingering the goods is put in doubt. Just as the quasi-commercial photo invites us to picture ourselves there, the objects sell themselves with a shamelessness that would make most sculptures blush. Certainly these issues have been raised before and are now much in the air (witness the new installation next door at Dia, a collaboration between Jorge Pardo and Gilberto Zorio that involves movable curtains and working microphones, summoning related reflections on self-broadcast and consumerism). But they have seldom been addressed with as much wit and good cheer.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group