MENAGERIE OF MIRRORS

How did Monkey become Mankind? There’s a story that goes something like: we saw ourselves in a mirror, so we started throwing stones; trapped in a glass house, we tried to make ourselves at home. Call it another version of “stoned ape” theory.

From now until August 15th, design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero have taken up residence at R & Company with their latest show, Glass Subjects. Paying homage to Serge Roche’s mirrored Parisian gallery of the 20s, Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero have installed their own menagerie of mirrors in Tribeca, in a collection that spans centuries as well as artistic movements, “Everything cool to me about the decorative arts is embodied in the mirror,” says co-curator Charlap Hyman. “The workmanship, the craft, and then, on the other end of the spectrum, the psychological component.” Trace these twin rivers to their limit, and you’ll find a question at their fork: “How do we make ourselves at home?” Operating in-between opacity and reflectivity, the shining objects of Glass Subjects offer us more than a few possible answers. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for a resolution — it’s ultimately more questions that the mirror reflects back.

If you’ve followed the wunderkind firm these last years, you’ll know by now that Charlap Hyman & Herrero have always been a heady studio. Prior engagements include renovating Bernard Tschumi’s Blue Tower lobby in 2016, crafting stage sets for operas at the Nederlandse Reisopera in 2019, and designing scenographic installations for Camille Henrot exhibitions at Kamel Mennour (2022) and Hauser & Wirth (2025). Glass Subjects continues their legacy of playful highbrow art pop surrealism, with a checklist that includes both contemporary art-world stalwarts like Isa Genzken, Yayoi Kusama, and Superstudio, alongside obscure, unattributed Venetian shield-mirrors, a 19th-century cobalt wall mirror, and, not one, but two mirrored monkeys.

Clearly, the duo have indulged their taste for eclecticism to the fullest. In the face of so many artistic periods and aesthetic styles, coherency can come into question. There’s no doubt that Glass Subjects has a dizzying effect, but this dissociation is demanded by the exhibition. Smart move. Is there any tool more useful than vertigo, if we wish to see sight seeing itself? The self self-ing itself?

As a frame for Glass Subjects, Charlap Hyman & Herrero took inspiration from Serge Roche’s Parisian gallery and its exhibitions of what he called objets de glace, works by himself and others made from glass and mirrors. Roche is today remembered as a designer for flamboyant midcentury European figures like Coco Chanel and Carlos de Beistegui, but Charlap Hyman & Herrero were more interested in his work as a gallerist and scholar. “Roche’s gallery had everything from Roman mirrors to contemporary mirrored Giacomettis,” says Charlap Hyman, “And he was obsessed with Versailles.” Roche (like CH&H themselves, perhaps) had a taste for the lurid, the Baroque. “There’s an overlap between the aesthetics of Roche’s Paris in the 20s and the 17th century. This can be traced, at least partially, to a set of antique silver furniture from the Hall of Mirrors [in Versailles] displayed for the first time at the Louvre. People lost their minds. Most of the silver furniture had been melted down to pay for the American Revolution. But that suite survived, and it ignited Roche’s imagination: he had a chair from it in his gallery.” In the back room of Glass Subjects, you will find the fruit of Roche’s obsession: his 1956 book appropriately titled Mirrors, appropriately sitting atop of a mirrored Maria Pergay coffee table.

When Roche closed shop on the Rue St. Honoré, his space was taken over by gallerist Jacques Kugel, and, for Glass Subjects, Charlap Hyman & Herrero worked with Galerie Kugel (now run by Kugel’s children and grandchildren), to source several of the exhibition’s most thrilling pieces. One of the show’s highlights is the Gothic, worm-eaten tabernacle attributed to Andrea Fantoni; borrowed from Galerie Kugel, its central mirror, flanked by rotting skeletons, serves as an intensely visceral memento mori. Elsewhere, a quartet of surreal, 18th century anamorphic oil paintings — painted by Henry Kettle and loaned from Kugel — hang on the wall. Place a curved mirror in the center and the images leap up off the canvas, re-constituted in three dimensions.

Charlap Hyman & Herrero are sensitive to the dual function that Roche’s “ice objects” serve. They shine with a luster both eye-catching and mind-bending. For the intellect, these objets d’art work as a kind of kaleidoscope through which to scry existential questions: “Who am I?” And in another, more primordial part of our lizard brain, these objects also function as a wonderful hoard — so much glittering treasure.

Echoing Roche, Charlap Hyman & Herrero similarly display both sides of the mirror. Glass Subjects includes a number of cerebral abstract artworks, such as Josh Smith’s mostly-black untitled (mirror) and Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s trompe l’oeil photograph of a taped-up mirror in Studio (0X5A0202) — both clearly an invitation to reconsider the visual construction of subjectivity. Meanwhile, across the room, Nicola L’s steel chaise or Richard Marquis’s mirrored car sculptures have a different appeal: neo-Versaillesianism, or, shiny-for-shininess sake. So polished, so pretty.

Intellectual Man contra hoarding, hypnotized Beast: the mirror reflects back an anthropological anxiety. Glass Subjects dares us to lean over the precipice, and gaze into that uncanny valley. To this end, perhaps the most poignant moment of Glass Subjects is achieved by the curatorial decision which marks the show’s beginning (and ending). Two monkeys flank the door to the street, like security guards, and to enter or exit the gallery, you must walk through their gaze. On your left as you enter, one of the monkeys hangs on the wall, painted in 1793 by Nicolas Maréchal — a mirror painted to his side, he side-eyes the viewer with his finest Mona Lisa smile. On your right, another monkey lies on the floor. Distorted by digital processing, flattened in vinyl, this monkey was fabricated for the show by Pilar Almon, Adam Charlap Hyman’s mom, and (echoing the Henry Kettle paintings elsewhere) is reconstituted to normal proportions in a mirrored pillar.

Jacques Lacan chose to begin his seminar on “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” similarly to Charlap Hyman & Herrero, observing that, “The human child, at an age when he is for a while… outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can already recognize his own image as such in a mirror.” Shakespeare likewise interrogated this theme in Act 2, Scene 2 of Measure for Measure, where Isabella pleas with Angelo:

But man, proud man
Dressed in a little brief authority
Most ignorant of what he's most assured
His glassy essence — like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven
As make the angels weep — who, with our spleens,
Would all laugh themselves mortal.

We might put monkeys in cages, or stuff the whole of Creation into glassy curiosity cabinets, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s precisely at the moment when we put our guard down and we feel most at home, that we find ourselves trapped somewhere between a mirror and a monkey. As we enter Glass Subjects between these two monkeys separated by centuries but reunited by a few feet of Tribeca real estate, Charlap Hyman & Herrero re-stage this ancient confrontation between intellect and pre-intellect, the reflexive and he unselfconscious, Man versus his dear old dad, Animal.

But rather than project this struggle onto an ahistorical, transcendental battlefield, Glass Subjects brings us down to earth. It asks: what’s the site for this confrontation? Its answer: Decorative Arts, or, The Home. And what’s the time of this confrontation? Adam reminds me, “That moment is really the 18th century. It’s the Enlightenment. It’s the end of the dominance of the Church. By the end of the 18th Century, a lot of households had mirrors, whereas before you could only find them in places like Versailles.”

Welcome home, mirrored monkey — whatever you think you’ve been trying to keep at a distance, it’s not working. And next time you find yourself wanting to throw some stones, think twice about how you’ve made yourself a home.