1999–2003Mixed Media
Brand Art
Objects produced solely to exist within the advertisement. Mixed media. 1999–2003.
"In 1999, we created a series of adverts as a device to promote our paintings, and these in turn became artworks. In 1999 too, we introduced the logo — a representation of our former artist name Leroy + Leroy. The logo became our signature, and along with the first adverts, it opened the way for a project called Brand Art."
The standard commercial sequence runs: product is manufactured, advertisement is produced to sell it. Brand Art inverted this. The sunglasses, fragrances, and jewelry were designed and produced solely to exist within the advertisement. The image was the raison d'être. The objects were props inside their own promotion.
This inversion positions the work directly within Baudrillard's account of the simulacrum — the representation becomes more significant than the thing represented, until the thing exists only to justify the representation. What Brand Art adds to this logic is a specific institutional target: the contemporary art market, where blue-chip works are acquired as asset-class luxury goods for the same reasons one acquires a Birkin bag. Status, scarcity, signature. By collapsing the distinction between an art installation and a luxury advertisement, the project makes this structural equivalence impossible to ignore.
The double bind the work produces is precise. The images are genuinely seductive. The viewer understands they are looking at a critique of desire and continues to desire the objects anyway. The awareness does not dissolve the wanting. That gap — between critical understanding and aesthetic response — is the work's actual subject.
The Leroy + Leroy logo introduced in 1999 became the collective's permanent signature. It is still in use.
Mixed media. 1999–2003.
The standard commercial sequence runs: product is manufactured, advertisement is produced to sell it. Brand Art inverted this. The sunglasses, fragrances, and jewelry were designed and produced solely to exist within the advertisement. The image was the raison d'être. The objects were props inside their own promotion.
This inversion positions the work directly within Baudrillard's account of the simulacrum — the representation becomes more significant than the thing represented, until the thing exists only to justify the representation. What Brand Art adds to this logic is a specific institutional target: the contemporary art market, where blue-chip works are acquired as asset-class luxury goods for the same reasons one acquires a Birkin bag. Status, scarcity, signature. By collapsing the distinction between an art installation and a luxury advertisement, the project makes this structural equivalence impossible to ignore.
The double bind the work produces is precise. The images are genuinely seductive. The viewer understands they are looking at a critique of desire and continues to desire the objects anyway. The awareness does not dissolve the wanting. That gap — between critical understanding and aesthetic response — is the work's actual subject.
The Leroy + Leroy logo introduced in 1999 became the collective's permanent signature. It is still in use.
Mixed media. 1999–2003.