OH MY BUDDHA

Xavier Mary studied at the École de Recherche Graphique (ERG), in Brussels, before going on to take part in many personal and group exhibitions. His artistic methods are characterised by forms of aesthetic syncretism, produced by a mix of very diverse formal influences. He is inspired by patterns or themes originating from very different universes, which are aesthetically, geographically or historically distant : mainstream cinema, electronic music, traditional rituals and ancient architecture from very different civilisations, automobile or truck tuning, rave parties, etc.

These scattered inspirations are then merged to give rise to forms constructed from raw industrial elements, calling back to the many artistic currents of the 20^th century (minimalism, abstraction and conceptual art). One of Xavier Mary’s major qualities lies in his instinctive capacity to create sculptures with industrial aesthetics which, he explains, « stand as vestiges of the dream of modernity ». It is with this in mind that we can consider that his artistic language is characteristic of the globalised 21^st century whose widely spread forms he captures in order to express a feeling of disillusioned finiteness.

Whilst he was in Cambodia, to prepare his important exhibition at BPS22, in Charleroi, Xavier Mary stopped in a village of sculptors where a large block of rough-hewn stone caught his eye, on which the initial contours of a sitting Buddha were starting to appear. He chose to carry out modelling of this shape to reproduce it in 3D. Thus reinterpreted, the rough outline of this canonical work of the Buddhist tradition evolved into an icon of disillusioned post-modernity, swinging between abstraction and portrayal, decay and potential, a trace of a bygone past or the possibility of a pending future.

Xavier Mary is represented by the galleries of Baronian Xippas (Brussels) and Nosbaum Reding (Luxembourg).