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When Henri Matisse described his work as “in step with the future”, he was thinking about his revolutionary cutouts, made with collaged coloured paper, rather than, say, the evolution of the women’s movement or consumer culture. The leading Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury came of age with the latter, but when she was invited to select drawings and cutouts from the Matisse estate for an exhibition, she was struck by the enduring immediacy of his vision. “My feeling with modernist artists is that, a lot of the time, they were trying to define what was happening within the history of art,” she says preparing for Drawing on Matisse, her showwhich situating 16 of his works within and alongside her impishly feminist and fashion-focused sculpture. “With Matisse, it was more like: ‘Just do it, be radical.’”
Fleury well understands the power of disruption. Her first work was a clutch of designer store bags full of high-end merch, which she dropped in the middle of a group exhibition in 1991. Fashion, that frivolous and feminine pursuit, was a luxury commodity but, she seemed to ask, was the art that surrounded it so different? Her work since has included canvases coated in pink fake fur, glittered rockets and a video of female bikers shooting guns at Chanel handbags. In previous projects laying bare art’s tacitly gendered aesthetics, she has feminised the macho minimalist visions of Carl Andre and Donald Judd, imagining an Andre-esque floor sculpture as a runway for women parading in stilettos, or riffing on Judd’s unadorned wall-mounted boxes by adding what look like blobs of shiny metallic melted flesh.
“Usually I pick work that has a hardness, play with that and balance its energy,” she says. Matisse, she concedes, is a rather different prospect. Although he emerged in an era dominated by great white men, it’s easy to imagine the modernist giant and Fleury getting along. For one thing, they share a love of what is typically dismissed as unserious: luxury textiles in clothes and furnishings, drawing out how we infuse them with human desires. Matisse’s impenetrable black-eyed odalisques have a readymade echo in some of the sculptures Fleury is showing alongside his drawings, which use female mannequin limbs as stand-ins for women. Sprayed with seductively glossy car paint and draped with designer clothes, these body parts protrude from floors and walls, literally interrupting the space with a female presence.
The drawings Fleury has selected span four decades of creative experimentation, but almost all of them depict women. “Maybe it’s my twisted vision,” she says, “but it struck me that he wasn’t just using models as models, but was inspired by them.” Many are strikingly timeless, casually posed and unselfconscious, captured in a few swift lines. Of course, as she points out, the women in Matisse’s orbit were more likely to be models and/or muses than artists. To bring Matisse into her world, Fleury has designed a series of frames for the drawings, using fronts fashioned from clear Venetian Murano glass created with the glass sculptor Françoise Bolli, bolted to mirrored backs. “You can really see with Matisse’s cutouts how he wanted to get away from frames and this is very poignant. It’s a little bit funny that in the end I’ve made frames,” she says.
Although Fleury says she wasn’t interested in deflating the art historical bombast that surrounds the work of a titan such as Matisse, her mirrors will, quite literally, put live women on an equal plane with the drawings. “As a matter of fact,” she says, “you could disregard the Matisse drawing if you wanted to check your lipstick.”
Drawing on Matisse, An Exhibition By Sylvie Fleury is at Luxembourg & Co, London, to 2 May.
Can you fille it: works by Fleury and Matisse
Henri Matisse, Algues 1947
Matisse began creating his cutouts – painted paper scissored and then pinned into arrangements – following illness that made painting itself too difficult. Yet the results have an energetic immediacy, a fleeting and provisional feel and represent a break with the past, which is surely what Fleury means when she describes his work as “punk”.
Sylvie Fleury, After All 2022
The mannequin limbs that erupt unexpectedly from walls or floors in Fleury’s exhibitions have been given an extra-shiny coating of special car paint, riffing on the idea that we find our own longing reflected in consumerism’s beguiling surfaces. She says she treats the designer clothes she uses like a palette, not only of colour but shape and material.
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Henri Matisse, Fille allongée, robe bouffante 1926
This dates from the decade when Matisse was focused on patterned textiles and “odalisques” in paintings where the the subject’s libidinal energies seem to have pulsed outwards into the surrounding decor.
Henri Matisse, Modèle en maillot 1941
This drawing was created when Matisse was unwell and working in series on themes such as the female figure, flowers and fruits. It is one of Fleury’s favourites. “I could never have guessed when it was made,” she says. “It reminded me of so much fashion photography.”
Henri Matisse, Étude, yeux et lèvres c1916
Fleury says this drawing was an obvious choice for her, given her interest in the fragmented female body, as well as makeup. In one older work, the 2007 video Drastic Makeup, a green Buick crushes cosmetics under its bouncing wheels.
