The young Belgian artist Xavier Mary uses industrial design equipment to create large-scale sculptures. He employs familiar and everyday objects such as gray Euronorm boxes, the same that travelers at airports use to hold their laptops, phones, belts, and keys for X-ray scans. In this exhibition, the boxes are arranged to form the word SPECIFIC, under which fluorescent tubes create the word PATTERNS. Mary also presents an installation with trampoline netting stretched between scaffolding elements in the two exhibition spaces, as well as sculptures made of corrugated sheet metal––used for so many warehouses and temporary furniture markets erected hastily along access roads. The sculptures are based on designs that the artist prints on colored paper and are presented in what he calls a laboratory: a rectangular table where more Euronorm boxes containing the printouts are displayed under a sheet of glass. What appears at first to be an aesthetic strategy situated between the technological and the minimal is actually a direct transformation of everyday experience into art. Mary’s extremely creative work entails stunningly simple artistic interventions into the world of forms that surround us. Despite its emphasis on surfaces, his practice is anything but superficial: It contains numerous references to the history of architecture, art, and design, ranging from the Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta to the contemporary artist Reinhard Mucha.
