The EQS SUV is a stylish creation by Mercedes chief designer Gorden Wagener, with none of the brashness of some rivals

Mercedes-Benz has made an electric luxury SUV quite unlike any other, and we love it

One of the fears of anyone who has been appreciative of high end automobiles the last years or decades is that electric cars, while having zero tailpipe emissions (although they still do have a carbon and environmental cost in their manufacture and sourcing of electricity) will lack an essential character.

When every car is electric, this argument goes, they will all essentially be more or less the same thing with a different brand attached – accentuated by the fact that electric vehicles also have advanced and highly developing technological interfaces, which are largely sourced from the same suppliers, like all digital technology.

We remember speaking about these matters with the legendary Mercedes-Benz designer, Gorden Wagener, a few years back; Gorden insisted that there would be as much differentiation in the design and feel of Mercedes’ electric vehicles as there has been in their conventional cars.

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The EQS is a SUV – a type of car usually associated with massive emissions. It is fully electric though, so no worries on that front, at least during its daily use. It also achieves a remarkable goal of being very big SUV that does not look either aggressive or lumpen. It is smoothly designed and seems to shrink on the road, meeting no hateful looks from the resentful brigade.

The real revelation, though, is in the way it drives. Many SUVs set out to try to emulate the driving experience of the regular saloon/sedan cousins, something made almost impossible by their high centres of gravity and inherently massive weight – most of them weigh above two tonnes and a luxury SUV can weigh close to three tonnes.

This means that not only can they not drive like sports cars, but the passengers’ experience can also be compromised, with manufacturers left in a hard place between making the ride firm and unyielding (theoretically improving the dynamic qualities) or softer, but then allowing the forces of physics to dictate something that can be quite difficult to stomach in terms of a wallowing feel, particularly in association with the rapid but silent acceleration offered by electric cars.

The Mercedes-Benz ESQ SUV has a sophisticated and contemporary driver’s environment

That’s where the EQS is unique. Shoot off in the EQS (like all electric cars, it’s fast, although the 450 model we drove is not the fastest), and you have a delicious feeling of being cosseted – this is not a car aimed at setting record track lap times. Passengers felt the same. There is a luxuriant, old school refinement to being on the move in this car: objectively that is down to a ride that absorbs bumps and bits of broken road.

There is huge refinement in terms of what car companies call NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) but also a feeling that the engineers who made this car just really understand what makes a luxury car. Step out of the EQS into any other electric vehicle and you will notice the difference on this front.

So, a point of difference and a significant one given that this is a luxury car.

The technological interface is also sophisticated and easy to use, although this is much less of a differentiator these days. And while the design feels are highly up-to-date, we wonder if Mercedes has gone a little too far or making the interior feel “contemporary“ rather than “luxurious“. It’s as if the engineers did their bit brilliantly in the way the car rides and drives, but the interior designers were a little bit wary of making it look too traditional. Shame, because no major manufacturer does interior luxury like Mercedes. Functionality is for Teslas.

Read more: Porsche Reviews Series: 911 GTS

But the most important element of a car like this is the feeling of quality, and the way it rides and drives. The EQS has one of the best electric mileage ranges of any car – although range is a technology that will constantly improve – and it is a car that you wish to sit back and luxuriate in, whether as a driver at the helm (and it really does feel like a helm, in the best luxury Mercedes, type of way) or passenger. So bravo Mercedes for having the bravery to create something that is truly – we think – what do your clients will want. Next, just add a bit of Palace of Versailles – or even Schöbrunn, if you want to keep it Germanic – to the interior for that ultimate touch of baroque ‘n’ roll.

Find out more: mercedes-benz.co.uk/suv/eqs/

‘Charline & Blanche’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

Dutch artist Viviane Sassen is known for her visceral portrayals of the human form in all its beauty and frailty. Maisie Skidmore meets the Deutsche Bank Lounge artist for Frieze London this year to discover more ahead of her new photographic series set in Versailles

DEUTSCHE BANK WEALTH MANAGEMENT x LUX

Tucked quietly into the extensive grounds of the Palace of Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris, the historic Small Stables contain the Galerie des Sculptures et des Moulages. It’s a secretive institution, closed to the public except for special events, within which the Palace’s damaged sculptures are kept for restoration. For many, the rows of fractured alabaster bodies make for an eerie sight. For Viviane Sassen, discovering them was like stumbling upon buried treasure.

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“I started shooting the old sculptures, many of which were broken, missing hands, or legs, or arms, or heads,” she says, her voice quickening in excitement. The Dutch photographer’s masterful work has long distorted and elevated the human form, so the Galerie made for fertile soil when she was granted run of the Palace’s grounds to create a new series inspired by Versailles. The resulting work, Venus and Mercury, is on display as part of the Visible/Invisible exhibition in the Palace’s Grand Trianon until October 2019, when it will be reconfigured for Deutsche Bank’s Wealth Management Lounges at Frieze London & Frieze Masters. “It was amazing to see. Usually these bodies don’t have flaws, they’re beautiful, sculpted to perfection,” she says. “Seeing them in decay, ripped apart, or in storage with stickers on them…” It couldn’t be more appropriate given the illicit and often disease-ridden underbelly of life at the French court in days gone by. “I loved it.”

‘La Mauresque’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

Sassen’s fascination with Versailles’ regal sculpted forms had been seeded long before, when her parents first brought her to visit the Palace at the age of 13 or 14. Then, coming from her small hometown in the east of Holland, its sensuality came as a pleasant shock to the system. “I vaguely remember being overwhelmed by its beauty, the very first time I visited Versailles,” she recalls. “I was especially drawn to all the nude sculptures in the gardens. I think it triggered my imagination on an erotic level; as a young teenager I was just waking up, in that sense. Seeing all these gorgeous bodies…” Her soft, clear voice still sounds somewhat awestruck. “And you’re allowed to look at them!”

‘Penicilline’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

The human form has long been a source of fascination for Sassen. A sensitive and intuitive child, she was born in Amsterdam, but spent three formative early years in Kenya, where her father, a doctor, ran a polio clinic. Sassen grew up playing with young friends whose bodies looked profoundly unlike her own, marvelling together at their similarities and differences. Later, back in the Netherlands, when an adolescent growth spurt propelled her slim frame to just under six feet tall, Sassen’s curiosity with the body manifested in strange corporeal sculptures which she would create herself, standing naked in front of her mirror. Limbs contorted into unexpected shapes, and twisting torsos closely cropped, have been a recurring motif in her work ever since.

Read more: Spanish artist Secundino Hernández on flesh & creative chaos

Which, of course, serves to set Sassen apart from her peers in fashion photography – an industry whose primary occupation is to reify the human body, and a world she has deftly kept one foot in for many years. She has worked with Dior, Hermès, Missoni and Miu Miu, and has shot editorial fashion images for many magazines. All the while, her personal practice continues quietly but fervently, news of a new solo exhibition or book surfacing with stunning regularity.

‘Syph #01R’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

How does she switch so effortlessly between the two? It’s a question of balance, she says. “To travel in a light and simple way in Africa with my husband and son, and two weeks later, to be in a studio shooting in Paris with a big team, with so many professionals. I feel very lucky that I’m able to go in and out of these very different worlds.” The two sides seem to maintain a symbiotic relationship, she continues; the fact that they are so unalike in nature doesn’t faze her. “I’m really drawn to opposites,” she says. Light and shadow; introversion and extroversion; heaven and earth; they all underpin her practice. She mirrors them in her character, even. “On the one hand, I am, like the Dutch generally, very blunt and straightforward, practical, pragmatic. On the other hand, I’m a dreamer.”

‘Occo’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

Nonetheless, Sassen’s practice is rooted not in logic, but in emotion; it’s often only in hindsight that a series’ conceptual roots within her own lived experience becomes clear. Take, for instance, Umbra, a 2014 project about shadow and, more abstractly, a way to wrestle with the idea of death. “It was a kind of revisiting of my past,” Sassen says, softly. “My father passed away when I was 22. He ended his own life. That has been a huge influence in my life and also on my work. He was a doctor, and the human body as a form of expression – but also containing many ambiguities and paradoxes – that is always present for me somehow. In Venus and Mercury, it comes across again; the erotic, or the body as a sculpture, but also the decay. Fear of sickness, fear of death…

Read more: Art photographer David Yarrow on his image ‘The Unusual Suspects’

“But after I did Umbra, I had this urge to do something about life and fertility, and my own motherhood. Femininity and the organic, as opposed to the more masculine and the abstract.” Looking back, she can trace the origins of these ideas to their starting points within her own story, she says. “[But] when I start working on something new, I often don’t really know what it is about. Along the way it becomes clear. I think, ‘Oh, wait a minute, this has something to do with me!’”

‘Leïla’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

Looking at her most recent body of work through this lens, Sassen has yet to determine the resonance of Venus and Mercury, which extracts five stories from the Palace of Versailles’ tumultuous history for examination in image form. The result is at once sensual and sinister, often profoundly poetic. But it’s vivid and experimental too; the images are punctuated with paint and pigment, multimedia studies of subjects, scenes, manuscripts from throughout the Palace’s past and grounds.

As is often the case in Sassen’s practice, the stories it tells were unlocked in part through the characters she cast to enact them. Stepping outside the Palace’s sprawling confines for lunch in a nearby Japanese restaurant, she met Leïla, a French-Senegalese teenager, who seemed an ideal candidate to disrupt the oppressive interior. “She was such a cool girl – she had these grey braids, she was wearing cool clothes, she studied psychology in Paris. So I invited her to be photographed at Versailles, and to bring her friends.”

‘Secret letter/pink’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

The resulting juxtaposition: of a troupe of young women at ease in denim within the gilded walls, is irrepressible; a modern-day incarnation of the frivolity we can only imagine once took place there. “They went wild doing their own photoshoot while I was shooting them – on their phones, doing selfies, owning the place and themselves in it,” she continues.

Seen through Leïla and her friends’ eyes – and, in turn, through Sassen’s watchful lens – Versailles’ ornate monument to opulence becomes fresh, exciting and relevant once more. “It would be amazing, wouldn’t it, if they could gatecrash their predecessors’ party?” Sassen says, laughing. We can only imagine what Marie Antoinette might have thought.

‘Agias, Red’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen

HIDDEN HISTORIES

In Venus and Mercury, Viviane Sassen sheds light on the history of Versailles through five stories. Here, she shares some of the tales from the palace’s heyday that still fascinate her:

‘Code/Blue’ (2019), by Viviane Sassen.

1. “In the 17th and 18th centuries, Versailles and its gardens were full of prostitutes. There was a lot of syphilis. One of the signs that people had suffered with it was that their noses caved in to their faces, so they wore prosthetic noses. I was fascinated by the fact that all these people are long dead, but their noses are still there.”

2. “Historians still don’t know exactly what the relationship was between Marie Antoinette and her longtime friend Axel von Fersen – if it was purely platonic, romantic or sexual. They kept up a correspondence from when they met for the rest of their lives. Now those letters are in the Archives Nationales in Paris, where I photographed them. They’re written in code.”

3. “La Mauresse de Moret was a mixed-race child who was brought to an orphanage in the South of France, where she became a nun in a convent. She was supposedly the daughter of the Queen of France, Maria Theresa of Spain. The French court always denied it. Nobody knows exactly who her father was.”

4. “La Voisin was a kind of witch who lived in 17th-century Paris. She made potions. People in the upper classes went to her – she was very renowned. But later, she was convicted of poisoning people, sacrificing newborn babies to use their blood in Black Mass, and was sentenced to death.”

5. “In 1783, Marie Antoinette had herself painted by the female painter Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, who became a friend of hers. She painted her in a muslin dress, which was very modern at the time. But it became a scandal; it was too sensual.”

Viviane Sassen’s series ‘Venus & Mercury’ will be exhibited at the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounges at Frieze London & Frieze Masters from October 2-6, 2019. For more information visit: deutschewealth.com

This article was originally published in the Autumn 19 Issue.