CHEW ON THIS

Sylvie Fleury's work delivers coolly composed yet sharply pointed commentary on the limitations of traditional art historical categories and the mechanisms of artistic production. She reveals how seemingly objective systems—like the concept of the canon—are built on structural exclusions and narrow definitions. Through appropriation, shifts in context, and ironic twists, Fleury exposes these underlying patterns. She borrows the visual language of established art movements—often led by male figures—reinterprets it, and invites critical reflection: CHEW ON THIS!

Her monumental installation Center of Excellence (2002) also pushes back against conventional ideas of how space is defined in art. Instead of using heavy metal structures like those of Richard Serra, Fleury suspends flowing sheets of shimmering satin from the ceiling. This textile sheen gives the space a quiet monumentality. Softness replaces hardness, fluidity replaces fixity—challenging traditional associations between form, power, and masculinity.

Fleury also adopts in her series You Too Martin the conceptual visual language of Martin Barré, especially through the use of reflective surfaces that dissolve the boundary between the artwork and the viewer. Here, the image no longer exists solely within the object, but emerges in the moment of encounter—through reflection, movement, and the viewer’s own self-perception. In doing so, Fleury shifts focus from traditional, authoritarian image-making—long dominated by male painters—toward a more equal, self-aware experience. She replaces the canvas with a surface that not only mirrors the viewer's appearance but symbolically asserts the presence of female artistic authorship. The mirror becomes a projection surface for rewriting art history—toward visibility and recognition of women in art.

In one of her early conceptual, text-based works, Fur Fetish, The Silver Screen Survey (1997), Fleury types film titles onto tissues, noting scenes where actresses wear fur—like Sybil Shepherd in The Lady Vanishes, with the comment: “a Silver Fox Coat (very long).” These titles were collected from an online forum, forming a pseudo-scientific archive of female-coded imagery. Again, Fleury flips an entire artistic language—this time the conceptual practices of artists like Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, or Ian Wilson—into its opposite: the emotional, sensual realm of popular film culture.

From the very beginning, Fleury has embraced subversive strategies that diverge from traditional feminist codes. Her deliberate choice to foreground pleasure, luxury, and surface—rather than suppress them—becomes a gesture of empowerment, a declaration of freedom that resists the rigid conventions of the art world.

When Fleury explores the fetishized allure of luxury goods, she also dissects the social and economic power structures behind them. In Untitled (No Man’s Time) (2024), she arranges five pairs of silver high heels in a row on a woven carpet, evoking the hallway of a luxury hotel where guests leave shoes outside their doors for cleaning. Here, Fleury reveals the hidden systems at play—the promise of comfort built on invisible (often female) labor—and exposes the hierarchies embedded in the privilege of being served.

Since the late 1990s, Fleury has collected dog toys in Japan. Enlarged and grotesquely transformed, these figures—like the hybrid bird-creature Godzilla Dog Toy 3 (Crazy Bird) (2000)—become surreal witnesses to the mass production of standardized consumer aesthetics. By exaggerating them, Fleury exposes the absurdity of consumption.

–Juliet Kothe