Sylvie Fleury and the Allure of Glamour

An opaque, lacquered case of sensuously curving angles which, when unclasped, reveals a compact quadrant of dazzling eyeshadows and highlighter – the lightest swipe of a fingertip can illuminate your look. Or: a small yet cumbersomely shaped black box with anywhere between one and four compressed mounds of variously coloured powders – you can rub them on your face. Two ways to say the same thing.

I’m writing about the design of a Chanel compact. I’m writing about a Sylvie Fleury painting. To write about one is to write about the other. This is not about blurring boundaries, it’s about Fleury’s capricious, conceptual game of value: each is a gateway drug that deposits you as if through a trapdoor into industrially scaled desire, and it doesn’t matter which you got into using first. Feeding the bottomless aspiration of art or fashion is an enlivening tightrope walk – you could really ruin your life or become a legend.

In ‘Joy’, her 2019–20 solo show at Karma International in Zurich, Fleury included four acrylic on shaped canvas and wood paintings (Turbulent, Légèreté et expérience, Coral Burnt and Rose Pétale, all 2019) that we could say are ‘after Coco Chanel’ in the way that certain other paintings are credited as ‘after Rembrandt’. Proximity can make one minor. An artist can leverage it in a tawdry, desperate grasping after agency – or as a cunning, even satirical move against the very premise of stature.

Fleury has spent her career stalking the long shadow of fashion and luxury, even as art was being eclipsed by it. One of her earliest pieces, Coco (1991), is typical in its flick-of-the-wrist bluntness: a pile of boxes for Chanel’s eponymous fragrance. A spicy, baroque blend of singed clove and decaying rose, Coco debuted in 1984, in a decade when aggressively enveloping scents reigned. If you were to add up the retail value of each bottle that Fleury presumably bought in order to construct her artwork, why, you might have something close to the price of a painting by an ultra-contemporary emerging artist! Fleury was ahead of the curve, her influence wafting into the sensibility of a new generation that takes the frivolity of consumption seriously – think of Bruno Zhu or Jasmine Gregory.

In 1987, Barbara Kruger announced I Shop Therefore I Amand moved on without ever admitting her hauls, but Fleury has made a practice out of shamelessly tarrying in the reality of such a dictum. She deigns to acknowledge the consumer as someone like herself – someone like me, and someone beautiful like you.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘After Coco’

‘Thunderb’ is on view at Mrac Occitanie, Sérignan, New York, until 31 December and ‘Instructions for Twilight’ will premiere as part of The Performa 2025 Biennial, New York, until 23 November

^{Main image: Sylvie Fleury, Coco (detail), 1991, Chanel boxes in different sizes, dimensions variable. Courtesy: © Sylvie Fleury and Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery; photograph: Pierre Tanguy}