In artist Sylvie Fleury’s sculpture, it is difficult to know if she’s celebrating consumer culture by pushing it to the extreme, or if she’s being sarcastic about luxury. Her latest show at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris revisits her work and lets visitors decide for themselves which version they prefer. Azzedine Alaïa delicate high heels become a bronze sculpture, just like the silver Celine bag not far. A yoga mat in bronze evokes minimalist artist Carl André. A 3 meter wide version of a hairclip looks like a delicate sculpture for a giant. Gold Gucci handcuffs. Piles of Chanel boxes. “Mountains of Slim-Fast milkshake powder tins sculpted in bronze– vanilla, café au lait, strawberry – create a play on ideas of excess, but also of restriction. The meal replacement drink, targeted at women who want to lose weight, is transformed by the artist into a comment on the unfulfilled promises of consumption in a context of ever-increasing pressures on women to achieve unattainable beauty standards,” explains Fleury’s gallery.
Is the exhibition a gorgeous celebration of the excesses of our culture in which luxury has taken over our lives, or is Sylvie Fleury making fun of it and of our devotion to it ? Or is she reclaiming and making desirable artworks out of objects considered as “feminine” - a vanity case, lipstick - and therefore not taken seriously ? The artist lets you decide. She also presents a rocket in a color usually associated with beauty products. In the past, she even made rockets in white fur, making fun of the ultimate masculine symbol. No one can escape Sylvie Fleury's ironic gaze.
Pieces, covering the gallery’s ground floor, are presented in no particular order. In this look at Fleury’s 30 year career, it’s the spirit of abundance and generosity which matters. The display is an echo of the tsunami of luxury consumer products surrounding us. As one of her neon signs says on the 2nd floor: “YES TO ALL”. Usually, this shows up when we’re opening a new web page and it offers visitors a choice. Here, there’s no choice. It’s only “Yes to all”, the motto of our era of excess.
However we look at Sylvie Fleury’s work, one cannot be indifferent to the joy and playfulness of her work. It’s not only the sculptures which evoke American artists Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd or Andy Warhol. Sylvie Fleury loves to play with words and slogans and advertising through her work with neon on the 2nd floor. “Buy Me” proclaims one sign. “Eternity Now”, states another one.
Sylvie Fleury was born in Geneva in 1961 right in the middle of the boomer generation, full of enthusiasm, at the onset of consumer culture. She still lives and works there. Since her first exhibition, Shopping Bags, in 1991, in which she installed an assortment of real luxury shopping bags from different brands, she has been drawing from the fields of fashion, pop culture, car racing - she loves cars - cinema and science fiction, to create her own visual vocabulary. She was the pioneer to create the connection between fashion and art. 30 years later, fashion has completely overtaken the artworld. The exhibition at the Ropac Gallery reminds us how visionary her seemingly superficial and fun work truly was.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Sylvie Fleury. Sculpture Nails. Galerie Ropac Marais. Until February 22. ropac.net.
