Sylvie Fleury

Cosmic Atlier, 2005

Sylvie Fleury’s six video films, commissioned for the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection, fuse the myth of the legendary Mercedes-Benz motor cars from the Blitzen-Benz via the batwing door model to the C111 with the contemporary ideas about art and fashion. Fleury has female models with trendy outfits direct and demonstrate classically ‘male’ actions in the authentic Stuttgart showplaces for the historical Mercedes-Benz vehicles – in the showrooms, workshops and on the test track at the Classic Center in Fellbach near Stuttgart: batwing doors rise and fall like the wings of futuristic angels, the models polish the shiny paintwork of vintage cars with their hands, cosmetic products are crushed by the wide racing tires, engines revved up, silver balls swept through the factory halls. The models are both actors and uninvolved observers. The striking feature of all the video works is that an exciting ‘story’ is abandoned in favor of the simplest gestures, repeated stoically. This gives the videos their spacey, surreal, almost occult character.