In Bertrand Lavier’s work painting as well as sculpture, both media discredited in the 20th century, returns each with its own means into the status of the an image as three-dimensional object. A representative work by Lavier is the Mercedes-Benz vehicle painted with transparent color coats, forming part of the Mercedes-Benz Art Collection. The work was developed as a part of Lavier’s exhibition in Hamburg (Deichtorhallen) 1991, where he painted over a big sailing boat. The outcome of this was the desire to work on another status symbol of luxurious mobility – in this case a black limousine. Lavier explicitly requested a car without motor and painted all its parts, even the wheels and wheel caps, so that the object is now detracted from its purpose at a double sense: the car is ‘put out of service’, transferred into an object of exposition, and it influences our desire for optic as well as haptic appropriation.