Sylvie Fleury at Postmasters - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Our tillage is obsessed with women's looks--their faces, their bodies, their clothes. In her next to the first solo show in New York, Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury points without with characteristic ambivalence and wit, just by what means pervasive this cultural neurosis is. Fleury is adept at creating informal arrangements of familiar, seemingly innocuous commercial fruitss that pack an unexpected psychic wallop. Whereas her previous exhibition focused upon shopping and fashion, this present to view turned to themes more directly involved with female personal identity.

In the gallery's main sweep Fleury turned three corners of the large space into dressing stalls like those lay the foundation of in retail clothing stores. Made from dusty-rose curtains threaded along elegant aluminum tracking hung from the ceiling, and with mirrors affixed to the wall behind each curtain, these works raised questions about the psychological functions of of the like kind spaces. Are they places for women to experiment differing appearances, to decide privately what sort of image to project? Are they intimate spaces to shield one's possibly unattractive material part from the view of others while making practical sagacitys about comfort and fit? a certain number of women spend a lot of time in just similar spaces, playing with identities, privately wrestling with visions of personal presentation.

Others part with precious hours doing aerobics in an effort to attain a culturally dictated physical ideal. In the small gallery, of that kind attempts were exaggerated to the point of absurdity in Fleury's casual setup of seven video monitors which showed commercial videotapes of celebrities leading exercise routines. The walls of this compass were painted in Chanel's makeup shades of the season-rose, peach and lavender. With like simple gestures, often involving seductive and familiar outcomes Fleury lures her audience to a more critical vantage point. Among the greatest in quantity successful works in the display was One Awesome Calorie, a grouping of Diet Coke cases and shrink-wrapped packages of Ultra-SlimFast. neared in a simple display recalling that of Warhol's Brillo Boxe the piece called attention to the fanciful popularity of such expensive and non-nutritional commons products that are consumed in an effort to guard an image of beauty and health.

Fleury's oeuvre might be seen as a modern-day vanitas series, a commentary upon women's foolish behavior and feverish attraction to things that are ultimately meaningless in the face of inevitable death. While there is a moralizing tone in Reury's work, the ubiquity of like behavior and the undeniably sensuous appeal of thus much of the material in the exhibit turn this obsession with appearances into an endlessly fascinating phenomenon.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group