La matière avant le nom: Galerie Philia and Espace Meyer Zafra at Paris Design Week

During Paris Design Week this year, Galerie Philia and Espace Meyer Zafra present La matière avant le nom, a design exhibition that brings together the work of design studio Kar, the ceramics of French designer Louise Traon and works by three contemporary artists, including Manuel Mérida, Francisco Salazar and Anaïs Vindel. “A chair, a table, a vase, a painting: each object seems at first to be assigned a name, a function, a place. This exhibition begins at the very moment when these certainties begin to unravel,” Galerie Philia notes.

Kar’s Formless collection is created in fibreglass and the pieces remain functional while resisting a fixed identity. Their irregular surfaces and supple, almost geological volumes suggest rock, clay or matter altered gradually by time. “The furniture never fully closes in on its function. It remains on the threshold of sculpture, as though it could still become something else,” the design gallery notes.

With Traon’s ceramics, a more elemental understanding of matter emerges in the showcase (which is on view from September 10, 2026). Her glazed stoneware incorporates wild clays, ashes, granite and chalk—materials whose physical properties shape each work. “The hand works alongside a material whose reactions it can never entirely control,” the contemporary design gallery explains.

In Mérida’s works, matter appears in continual motion, redistributing itself across the composition and resisting a definitive image. Salazar’s white reliefs similarly depend on perception: light, shadow and the viewer’s movement constantly alter what appears before them. In Vindel’s paintings, colour opens onto ambiguous depths, somewhere between landscape, memory and apparition.

As the gallery explains, “From one work to the next, painting acquires volume, furniture becomes almost an image and ceramics retain the memory of earth and fire. Synthetic matter appears mineral or organic. Between surface and depth, use and contemplation, categories become momentarily uncertain.”

The exhibition’s title, La matière avant le nom—‘matter before the name’—describes a suspended state. It is the instant before categorisation, when an object has not yet fully settled into the identity assigned to it. "Not a world without distinctions, but a world in which things remain open enough to still be named otherwise," Philia notes.