Baby Blue Benzo

The Approach is pleased to present Baby Blue Benzo by Sara Cwynar, her second exhibition at the gallery. Presented in the main space, Baby Blue Benzo (2024) is a major video installation shot on both digital and 16mm film, shown at a monumental panoramic scale. In parallel, a selection of accompanying photographs are exhibited in The Annexe set against wallpaper designed by the artist. Baby Blue Benzo (2024) begins with the Mercedes Benz 300SLR, the most expensive car ever sold at auction (2022, 135 million euros) – and expands this object into a research film about the arbitrariness of value and the role of photography in capitalism as a generator of desire. Cwynar incorporates filmed representations of herself in the Benz, of hired models and crew, and of friends and collaborators like the graphic designer Tracy Ma. This amalgamation of images, all shown at varying scales, is unveiled in a continuous horizontal scroll across an extra-wide screen, a new animation style that Cwynar developed for the film. In the film, Cwynar connects the Benz to benzodiazepines, medications commonly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia – conditions which the artist has experienced herself. She links heightened states of wakefulness to the continuous hum of twenty-first-century life, tracing a parallel between the emergence of photography and the development of the Fordist assembly line. Both, she suggests, reshaped how modern subjects understand themselves in relation to productivity, consumption and image. At its core, the film explores surrealism, sleeplessness, and late capitalism as a kind of dream state where a constant stream of images and information – encountered through phones and everyday experience – resembles a state once unimaginable outside of sleep. It considers design, fashion, beauty and desire, positioning sleep as perhaps the only remaining autonomous space beyond the reach of technology. The framed works featured in The Annexe extend these themes: a reworked image of the eighteenth-century porcelain sculpture The Disturbed Slumber , chosen for its proximity to the early Industrial Revolution, becomes a surface for collage and text related to insomnia. Other images include a pregnant woman, a counterfeit Rolex watch, a tired-looking Pink Panther doll in a shop window, a pink peony, a model reclining beside a life-sized wooden replica of the Benz, and a collage built over an archival photograph of a doll modelling early French fashion. These works form part of Cwynar’s ongoing research reflecting on the evolution of consumption, drawing parallels with contemporary e-commerce aesthetics. The film concludes with a line from Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System (1967), in which the ideal woman of fashion embodies a set of contradictions (demure and determined, tender and tough), offering a fantasy of totality in which one can be everything at once, without having to choose. In fashion, the subject becomes both impossible and entirely legible. Cwynar’s work engages with these unattainable ideals - the images and fantasies that sustain cycles of desire, circulating through celebrities, commodities, and identities that feel within reach yet remain perpetually out of grasp, existing most fully as photographs or as lines of advertising.