When Renault gave American artist Joshua Vides complete creative freedom over the Twingo E-Tech Electric, the result turned a compact city car into a question that proved impossible to ignore: when does a car stop being a car and become art? The answer, revealed over five live performance days at the Renault Carwalk on the Champs-Elysees in April 2025, is that the boundary is far thinner than anyone expected. The Twingo x Vides collaboration now holds a place in Renault's official Art Cars collection alongside some of the most significant artist car commissions in automotive history.
Who Is Joshua Vides?
Joshua Vides is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist known for a signature method: he draws directly over three-dimensional objects using bold black outlines and flat white surfaces, collapsing depth and making real things look like sketches pulled out of a notebook. He has applied this technique to shoes, furniture, entire rooms, and now a complete automobile. The visual effect is immediate and deeply disorienting. Your brain recognises the object, but the object refuses to behave the way it should. It does not look designed. It looks drawn.
For cars, this is an unusually powerful technique. Automotive design is entirely about communicating depth, surface quality, and dimensional presence. Strip those away with flat colour and outline, and you are left with something that oscillates between a vehicle and a graphic. That oscillation is precisely where the art lives.
Five Days of Public Transformation
Renault staged the transformation at 53 Champs-Elysees from 8 to 13 April. Vides worked on the Twingo in full public view, with two dedicated performance sessions open to visitors. The deliberate transparency of the process was central to the project's meaning. There was no studio, no secrecy, no finished object arriving packaged. People could watch a car slowly change identity in real time. The familiar proportions of the Twingo stayed intact, but the visual language shifted entirely: white body surfaces, black outlines following every edge and rib, a treatment that looked simultaneously like a concept sketch and a finished statement.
This approach also solved a problem that plagues most automotive art collaborations: the artwork usually arrives after the car, disconnected from it. Here the transformation was the exhibition. The object and the act of making it were inseparable.
What Makes a Car Become Art?
The question the project raises has been explored by artists and car manufacturers for decades, from Andy Warhol's BMW M1 to Vito Schnabel's Rolls-Royce commissions. But most art cars maintain the essential readability of the vehicle as a machine. Vides does something more radical: he attacks the car's status as a dimensional object. By flattening it visually, he forces viewers to think about what they are actually looking at rather than simply using the object as a visual shorthand for "car".
The Twingo is particularly well-suited to this treatment. Its rounded, almost cartoonish proportions already hint at the world Vides works in. The forms are graphic by nature. Vides does not fight the design; he completes a transformation that was already implicit in the shape.
The exhibition continued until 9 June at the Renault Atelier on the Champs-Elysees under the title "Pop Art Car" before the vehicle joined Renault's permanent Art Cars collection. You can read Renault's official account of the collaboration on the Renault global media site, and a detailed breakdown of the technique appears in L'Argus.
Art Cars and the TheArsenale Collection
The Twingo x Vides project sits in a long lineage of vehicles that have crossed the line from product to artwork. TheArsenale has been curating that lineage for years. The Renault AIR4 concept art car, a TheArsenale Edition collaboration, is one of the most direct expressions of what happens when automotive design and creative direction fully merge. The broader car art and automotive art collection spans coffee tables made from engine components, one-off race livery prints, and sculpture-grade design objects that challenge the same boundary Vides has just made visible in a new way.
For a deeper look at mobility-inspired art and culture, explore the full culture and design collection and TheArsenale Gallery, where the distinction between vehicle and artwork dissolves entirely.
Photo: Renault / Joshua Vides
