Gallery: The Spirit of Veronique
February 1, 2006
When Richard Pietruska peels off the spandex, as he did from his sculpture at August’s Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, spectators fall silent. Instead of a steering wheel and custom leather cabin, a polished plum-colored head, back, hips, and buttocks hang between the grille and rear fenders. Facedown, the female figure floats over a polished steel surface as a hollow black roofline bends up over the torso to complete her coupelike form. She is as much woman as she is machine.
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Veronique GT’s headlights switch from low to high beam and accent lights change
colors “to emphasize this thing is moving and hot,” Pietruska says. (Click image to enlarge.)
Automotive artist Pietruska likes to deliver his provocative sculpture Veronique GT wrapped in black spandex. “Part of her unveiling at Pebble Beach was having people first see her under this tight, formfitting cover,” he says of the 6-foot-long fiberglass sculpture. “It looked just like a car.”
Under her cover, Veronique’s swooping lines may be mistaken for that of the French coupe that inspired Pietruska’s design. The rare 1938 Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupe was one of only 16 built by French designer Figoni et Falaschi. Accompanying Veronique’s unveiling at Pebble Beach was, by coincidence, the first auction of a Teardrop of this caliber on U.S. soil. The Art Deco antique went for $3.69 million. “The French are a sensual nationality,” Pietruska says. “They came out with more sensual designs than any other manufacturer of their time.
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Pietruska’s limited-edition fiberglass and chrome Thunder Birds sells for
$11,000. (Click image to enlarge.)
“It also had something to do with the Art Deco movement,” Pietruska says of French automotive design. Sleek compositions of the 1920s and 1930s grew from the industrial world’s need for speed and efficiency. With distinctive chrome detail, stark lines, and bold color patterns, Art Deco depicted the imagery of the machine age. Pietruska uses style elements of the era, such as the characteristic pontoon fenders and curvy aerodynamic rooflines, but as the crowd at Pebble Beach saw, he makes a 21st-century interpretation of mechanization in a new world of Bluetooth headsets and voice-command navigation systems.
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