Surreal, strange and scatological

Why do we put one work of art beside another? For the most part museums and galleries tend to stick them on the wall as if they were butterflies or beetles, putting similar species together: an array of impressionist flowers, baroque altarpieces, pictures by a certain painter. But there are other ways to do it. Carambolages, a refreshing and highly entertaining exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, presents a dizzying diversity of stuff according to a quite different principle: namely, billiards.

‘Carambolage’ is a term that originates from the game of carambole, or French billiards, as once observed by Van Gogh and Gauguin in the Café de la Gare, Arles. It translates into English as ‘cannon’: hitting one ball so that it strikes two others. The exhibition operates in just the same way: one work suggests another and another, which may come from any time and place.

Thus a series of objects riffs on the theme of breasts. There is a Roman sculpture of Artemis of Ephesus, who had far more than the normal number, causing her to look like a date palm heavily laden with fruit. Several other mammary-related works include a martyrdom of St Agatha, whose tormentors removed hers with pincers, and a couple of bizarre and, one is tempted to say, highly Gallic objects: a bronze cup from around 1810 in the form of the bosom of Pauline Bonaparte, and a rival royalist porcelain bowl apparently modelled from the bust of Marie-Antoinette.

From there, the sequence segues on to a completely different subject: tableware. So next in view is a ninth-century Iranian ceramic, decorated with wonderful abstract splodges and dribbles, a cup from Tang dynasty China, and a piece by the contemporary artist Daniel Spoerri from 1964, consisting of the remains of a meal — dregs of coffee in a cup, smears of food on a plate — all mounted on a piece of wood in the manner of a still-life.