Chakra #4 & Chakra #5

Xavier Mary’s work has been part of the Sart-Tilman Open Air Museum’s collection for several years: his sculpture titled Harry was installed near the Sports Centers in 2018. In 2019, Mary presented Λαβύρινθος (2014), a relief sculpture, and finally, in 2022, Digital monolithe blanc (acrylic on panel, 2009) was added to the Museum’s collection (donation AAP).

The three works showcase the relentless poetic coherence of Xavier Mary: the repertoire includes car showrooms and their accessories and options (preferably “full”), their symbolism marking the consumerist unconscious of industrialized Western society for the past hundred years, the grand spectacle of auto shows like those in Paris or Geneva (in Europe), and the ingenuity of these firms in imposing their brand. Mary also embraces an aesthetic of large wholesale halls: hardware stores, wholesalers of spare parts and construction materials… all these vast commercial warehouses that have inhabited urban outskirts for the past fifty years. There is also a clear fascination with what ordinary people discard, both literally and figuratively: waste, the powerful and indescribable awe that can grip one when contemplating a car graveyard, a metal crushing site, aircraft cemeteries that are more numerous than the hypothetical elephant graveyards…

From this strange and very coherent imaginary repertoire, Xavier Mary extracts singular objects whose strong connotations are self-sufficient. The constant flirtation with aesthetic temptation leads to no conclusion other than the amorality of objects.