Xavier Mary
02 - 25 Mar 2012
XAVIER MARY
Eat the Magic Lions
2 - 25 March, 2012
Xavier Mary's sculptures and installations are as minimalist as they are frequently overwhelming in dimension. Their own dramatic tension enables them to skilfully evade a purely formal reading and to fascinate the viewer merely by employing a truly endless number of technical refinements. For "Eat The Magic Lions" Mary has realised three huge lion's head sculptures, starting out from a 3-D model of a lion's head from the Internet. The 732 polygons of the first model in his sculpture were realised using cardboard packages of the breakfast cereal brand "Lions". Other sculptures were made with the aid of software developed for the computer game "Minecraft", which creates a landscape in the game using brick-shaped elements. The second component of the exhibition is a sculptural installation inspired by the architecture of the Khmer temples, "DVD Temple". Its sculptures are made of common polystyrene blocks and join together to form a kind of "altar", the central element of which is the looping DVD menu of the film "Apocalypse Now Redux". Other films available on blue ray are also ironically cited by Mary, including classics like "Terminator" or "Transformers". His installation accentuates the current multimedia formats such as Internet, 3-D, video games, DVD or blue ray in a kind of self-aggrandising pose somewhere between radicalism, illusion and redundancy. Mary's installations create a parody of the beacons of popular culture and centre on themes such as "appropriation" and "imitation", which are and will remain extremely relevant in face of our unlimited networks.
Xavier Mary is currently receiving a grant from the Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) and the Communauté Française de Belgique, Brussels in the context of our International Studio Programme.
Eat the Magic Lions
2 - 25 March, 2012
Xavier Mary's sculptures and installations are as minimalist as they are frequently overwhelming in dimension. Their own dramatic tension enables them to skilfully evade a purely formal reading and to fascinate the viewer merely by employing a truly endless number of technical refinements. For "Eat The Magic Lions" Mary has realised three huge lion's head sculptures, starting out from a 3-D model of a lion's head from the Internet. The 732 polygons of the first model in his sculpture were realised using cardboard packages of the breakfast cereal brand "Lions". Other sculptures were made with the aid of software developed for the computer game "Minecraft", which creates a landscape in the game using brick-shaped elements. The second component of the exhibition is a sculptural installation inspired by the architecture of the Khmer temples, "DVD Temple". Its sculptures are made of common polystyrene blocks and join together to form a kind of "altar", the central element of which is the looping DVD menu of the film "Apocalypse Now Redux". Other films available on blue ray are also ironically cited by Mary, including classics like "Terminator" or "Transformers". His installation accentuates the current multimedia formats such as Internet, 3-D, video games, DVD or blue ray in a kind of self-aggrandising pose somewhere between radicalism, illusion and redundancy. Mary's installations create a parody of the beacons of popular culture and centre on themes such as "appropriation" and "imitation", which are and will remain extremely relevant in face of our unlimited networks.
Xavier Mary is currently receiving a grant from the Wallonie-Bruxelles International (WBI) and the Communauté Française de Belgique, Brussels in the context of our International Studio Programme.