27/10/2008
Sylvie Fleury
Mamco, Geneve
Paillettes et Dependances ou la fascination du neant. A major anthology show. On the four floors of the museum, Fleury has chosen to bring together over 200 pieces, including a sizeable corpus of new productions. These range from paintings and sculpture to videos, photographs, sound pieces and environments created on-site. The works are organized in relation to the main themes running through her art, such as fashion and its multiple accessories, the world of automobiles and the conquest of space (with rockets and flying saucers distributed around the museum space).
From 29 October 2008 to 25 January 2009, Mamco is holding a major Anthology show of the work of Sylvie Fleury, reflecting the many different sculptural and visual aspects of her art. Paillettes et Dépendances ou la fascination du néant (Sequins and Dependencies or the Fascination of Oblivion) is the title she has given to this exhibition in Geneva, the biggest of her career so far.
On the four floors of the museum, Fleury has chosen to bring together over 200 pieces, including a sizeable corpus of new productions. These range from paintings and sculpture to videos, photographs, sound pieces and environments created on-site. The works are organized in relation to the main themes running through her art, such as fashion and its multiple accessories, the world of automobiles and the conquest of space (with rockets and flying saucers distributed around the museum space). It should be a very intense show!
This exhibition at Mamco could just as well be entitled “Water and Gas on Every Floor” or “Journeys to Nowhere Lands,” such is the diversity and the thematic range of the propositions here, which are an invitation to move and travel. In all, 3,000 m2 of floors, ceilings and picture walls are being taken over by this artist who in her early days was described as a trash pinup, a conceptual bimbo, agitator and hothead. All these things she may be, and more, and Fleury’s body of work is just as multifaceted, shot through with the desires and
excesses of consumerism. As Georges Perec foresaw in his 1965 novel Les Choses, the relation between the things making up our modern world and happiness is one of obligation. In other words, happiness and
consumption are linked.
Among the artist’s signature pieces, the Shopping Bags share the limelight here with the iridescent mushrooms. This homage to the composer John Cage, who was also a knowledgeable mushroom specialist, also brings to mind Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, just as the stalactites and stalagmites from caves that punctuate the exhibition are petrified forests that immerse us in a primordial chthonic world. Places of blindness, of solitary and mystic experiences, these crevices with their womb-like forms are also places where the self is reborn.
Alongside the glamour and kitsch of the early work, strange parallel worlds are adumbrated where boas go from feathers worn round the neck to stuffed creatures in Plexiglas cages. A world in which Dog Toys, oversize canine play things, become affable and kindly monsters drowsing in the fug of hallucinogenic emanations.
Blurred ideas and blurred esthetics, reflecting a word that has lost its bearings, are put to work here via an exhibition strategy that originated in the 1980s and their intermixing of fashion, advertising, design, visual arts and kitsch.
On all floors, Mondrian, Fontana, Cés ar, Buren, Vasarely and Carl Andre are recycled and customized, here with faux fur, there with nail varnish that, with its mix of fascination and iconoclasm, gives them a new singularity. As if pulled down by gravity, Buren’s stripes are deformed and swell, as in the Stretch series and its photographs of tight sweaters with geometrical patterns distorted by the opulent curves of young women’s chests. With fake Mondrians in synthetic fur, and slogans taken from advertising like readymade thoughts — BE GOOD, BE BAD, JUST BE or YES TO ALL, a parody of Joseph Kosuth’s Art as Idea series — Fleury builds bridges “between the history of modernist forms and the fashion system.”
From one floor to another we go from the exhaust fumes emitted by the crushed customized racecars of She Devils on Wheels in their trendy nail varnish colors, to the vapor trails of rockets and UFOs that use the third floor of the Mamco as a launch pad. As in a department store, the staircase is a nerve center. The entropy of the exhibition galleries stands in contrast to the simplicity and rigor of the huge metal clocks that make each landing a place for gathering thoughts. In the pale glacier-blue light of the neons that work as injunctions
( HYDRATE, LIGHTEN, PURIFY, SOOTHE ), time is suspended and Mamco recovers at the end of its surveyor’s chains its role as a factory for making measuring instruments. And as a dream factory, too, turning out
desires — and dreams of sequins and oblivion.
If woman is omnipresent in Fleury’s work, she more generally evokes humanity and its desire to fly, to drive
racecars, to conquer new territories and, more seriously, its desire to escape from its flesh and blood
condition and dissolve into the great Ether that infuses all bodies and vibrates under the action of diamond-colored light.
Press officer : Clarisse Jaouen, c.jaouen@mamco.ch, T. +41 (0)22 320 61 22
Press Conference Tuesday 28 October, 11 a.m.
Opening Night Tuesday 28 October, 6 p.m.
Mamco
10, rue des Vieux Grenadiers - Geneve
Open Tuesday to Friday from noon to 6 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. The show is closed on mondays as well as 24, 25, 26, 31 December 2008 and 1rst January 2009.
General admission: CHF 8.- / Reduced admission: CHF 6.- / Group admission: CHF 4.-