For the past 30 years Sylvie Fleury has
cast Prada shoes in bronze, painted cars with nail polish, crushed makeup
palettes by driving over them, and shot at Chanel handbags, all in the name of
art.
Her most recent works subvert the beauty
industry, as she reimagines eye-shadow palettes on a monumental scale to create
alluring abstract shaped-canvasses, with a colour palette that directly
references her source material from Chanel’s ‘Pink Explosion’ to Tom Ford’s
‘Camera Obscura’.
Fleury’s artwork explores the
intersections between art and commodification, with her alluring appropriation
of fashion codes and ready-made compositions questioning our desire for
consumerism along with notions of fetishism, beauty, and gender politics.
“Why has consuming become such a big
part of our world, and how did it become to be so? I see myself as a sensible
woman, yet I can have these huge craving for new things, sometimes just looking
at the boxes. I do have the wisdom to understand I’m being seduced, and yet, at
the same time should I deprive myself?” she muses adding she decided to use
makeup, clothes and shoes because they were arms of seduction as well as
weapons of empowerment that she related to.
“Very early on, it was very important
for me to make a point that my work was being made by a woman. I wasn’t just
trying to fit in and try to conform. I was a woman and I wanted to talk about
this [desire for consumption] from that perspective,” says Fleury, noting that
at the same time, her work doesn’t pass judgment on consumerism, “I don’t want
to make people feel guilty.”
Fleury admits that when she created her
first artwork, an installation of shopping bags with their contents, she had
“no clue I was putting my figure on something important” that would last.
“I went shopping and inside the bags
were all the things that I had bought knowing they would be part of the final
artwork, because they had elements in them that reminded me of art history, or
an event, or they had a conceptual appeal, or texture,” she recalls, adding
that while the branded packaging played an important role in her work, she was
interested in exploring how people related to the content of the bags, which
sometime they could not see.
“Back in the early nineties, fashion was
seen a lower kind of art. When I first started showing my work I got criticized
for incorporating elements of beauty and makeup, but I wanted to show that it’s
not superficial and in fact, you can use fashion and beauty to talk about
feminism, politics and consumerism,” she says.
Her work is not about fashion per se,
but she uses fashion as she would use a colour in her palette, she says: “That
colour allows me to talk about feminism, politics, fetishism and sexuality, for
example.”
With such awareness of fashion and
makeup, you may wonder what the artist’s favourite brands are, but Fleury is
“totally unfaithful” in her own approach, pointing out: “I don’t have a
favourite brand, it changes every season. That’s what’s great about fashion.”
A version of this story was first published on keyyes.com