by Anselm Pepto
Parquet Fontaine doesn’t make art so much as threaten it. His latest exhibition, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings, now staged across three non-contiguous rooms at the Nice Museum, is a study in discomfort—both ergonomic and existential. The sheer strangeness begins at the door, where visitors are greeted by a brightly painted intern offering mouth guards.
Fontaine, who rose to cult prominence after being ejected from the 2019 Venice Biennale for attempting to install a functional trampoline beneath the Hungarian Pavilion’s suicide installation, continues his inquiry into the violent intersection of mid-century design, unresolved childhood trauma, and contemporary conditions like gluten intolerance. He insists his practice is rooted in “accidental function”: objects that neither work nor completely fail, but hover in a permanent state of ethical hesitation.
At the heart of the show is Chair #0 (My Mother, My Algorithm), a fully upholstered screaming apparatus shaped like a Modernist chaise lounge with inexplicable antlers. It emits an irregular tone Fontaine calls “emotional tinnitus.” Made from materials including recycled juicing mats and loosely braided horsehair, the piece invites the viewer to recline in theoretical comfort, only to release a pungent waft of despair.
Across the gallery, Email to Dad (Unsent) takes the form of a 14-foot sofa filled with shredded tax forms and mounted on four gently vibrating pedestals. It hums softly in Latvian. Fontaine has said the sculpture “represents the slow buffering of forgiveness,” though I am at a loss at how exactly this is the case.
The walls are dotted with smaller works, including Ergo-Fascism I-IV, a series of IKEA instruction manuals annotated with deeply personal footnotes in crabbed handwriting. These are displayed under cracked sheets of resin labeled with fragments like “don’t sit like that, it’s what made you this way” and “remember: the stool is not your father.”
Curator Minerva Dent calls Fontaine’s work “an urgent response to the over-optimized present.” She gestures toward Standing Desk for the Emotionally Seated, a rotating podium of salt and chalk dust that periodically dispenses espresso beans into a child’s sneaker. “He’s interrogating postures of power,” Dent explains, “and also the legibility of ergonomic failure as an archival impulse.”
Reactions have been predictably divisive. A local paper labeled the show “a cry for help.” Sales in the gift shop have been sluggish, but this was to be expected when the gallery was forced to admit that none of the items are dishwasher-safe. Fontaine, for his part, remains elusive. When approached for comment during the opening, he described his work as “a minor intervention in my own visibility,” which confuses as much as it elucidates.
Still, Soft Objects for Hard Feelings is hard to forget. Whether it is performance, sculpture, or one man’s slow descent into furniture-based madness, Fontaine has built a space where the unsit-able becomes the unforgettable.