Xavier Mary

RAM - Dense Cloud Confidence

As our world and environment change from the natural to the technological, they retain the past, in the form of the remembered and the surviving ancient. This is a constantly evolving and shifting, but overarching influence that dominates our consciousness as a species on this planet. Human thinking and memory are visual and dominated by the geometry and the architecture of the ancient as well as the modern industrial. Whilst we remain oblivious to this influence and process, Brussels-based artist Xavier Mary lives and thrives in it, studying and understanding the dynamic dialogue that is constantly taking place between ancient geometry and form, modern technology and industrial aesthetics, and human cultural expressions of beauty.

Seemingly from the fringes of consciousness, where an altermodernist western industrial grunge directly encounters and entangles with eastern spiritual purism and chaos, Xavier’s forms and objects arrive at us pulsing, beeping, and vibrating with an invisible life-force of their own. His is a language that is post-millennial, with goals that are ancient, as evidenced with his own stone-temple-artefact, created with temple sculptors in Cambodia, wherein his singular goal is like that of a monk and his own inner visions. The artefact, a sculpture/temple monolith, is taken by Xavier deep into a jungle, installed, and left behind. The mental process is the same austere practice of monks of the past, even whilst the physical process is with the technology of the present and the conceptual spheres of the present, namely history and document. So, the temple-object is lost, and we are left with a video of its making and installation.

Xavier’s arrival in India, with Last Ship’s arrival in Khajuraho, seem inevitable and unstoppable. Beginning with a trip to the largest monolithic structure in the world, the Kailasa Temple at Ajanta and Ellora, Aurangabad, arriving and staying at Last Ship in Khajuraho, finding the end of time with the Kalinjar fort and temple and Last Ship’s space in Kalinjar, and searching for beauty in the garbage of Mumbai’s Deonar garbage dumping ground, Xavier’s residency has led him on the beginnings of a new direction. There is no other place or culture in the world that has the confluence of the ancient, modern, nature, chaos, destruction, pathos, tradition, culture, and a staggering, bursting of everything all at once that India does, and Xavier dived into it. From drinking in the beauty of the temples of Khajuraho, to falling in love with Tata trucks, and contemplating Kalinjar, the first thoughts, signals, objects, and visuals to arrive from Xavier’s residency all point to an exciting new body of work to come.