Sylvie Fleury’s exhibition emphasizes the fetish character of her works Review of her retrospective at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Isabelle Graw
Sylvie Fleury's recent exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris is a retrospective, which clearly highlights the particular fetish character of the works shown in the lower room. Most of the objects, placed closely together here, have highly shiny or reflective surfaces, which alone give them a fetishistic appearance. This is especially true of the rocket ( First Spaceship on Venus (Beyond Polish) , 2022), which stands at the front of the room and is coated in rich, pink, glossy, shimmering car paint. Like a fetish, this rocket, too, seems to have forgotten its production conditions in favor of its material properties. In addition to the phallic shape of this rocket, its texture and color are striking, reminiscent of lipstick and offering a feminine counterpart to the male-aggressive connotations of Elon Musk's rocket world. The monumentalized version of a hair clip in the center of the room also features a reflective aluminum surface (Hair Clip , 2024). A banal beauty item has mutated here into an insect with prehensile teeth, an amorphous entity whose shiny silver surface seems to conceal its production conditions, analogous to Marx's commodity fetish. At the same time, this monumental clip appears somehow autonomous and alive – in this, too, it resembles the commodity fetish. However, this object visibly stems from the idea of an artist, thus being enriched with artistic labor, which in turn distinguishes it from Marx's commodity fetish. For where Marx transforms the underlying concrete labor into abstract labor, here we are confronted with the result of artistic labor. Furthermore, the readymades reworked by Fleury are fundamentally objects associated with female lifeworlds – such as the aforementioned hair clip or the Chanel beauty products in the early showcase work Coco (1991), which is shown in the gallery's foyer and presents a pile of empty Chanel packaging like relics.
[...] Ordinary Slim Fast cans of various flavors—also made of bronze—are also arranged on the floor. They communicate with the history of the can in 1960s art, from Jasper Johns' Ale Can*s (1960) to Piero Manzoni's *Merda d'Artista (1961) to Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans (also in various flavors) of 1961. Cans are so interesting as objects of minimalist sculpture because, despite their industrial seriality, they evoke the existence of a mythical interior. Fleury's Slim Fast cans also point to the dictates of slimness to which women in particular are still subject. That the artist herself follows the fashion imperative is demonstrated by the mercilessly narrow-cut Alaïa shoes, cast in bronze, into which she once squeezed her feet.That it is always also her reality we are seeing is particularly clear in the new work Vanity Case (2024), a two-part print on mirrored aluminum that brings to mind the mirror works of Michelangelo Pistoletto and shows the artist from behind – wearing heels, naturally – as she packs her cosmetics case into the trunk of her car. [...]
