XAVIER MARY. VICTORY OVER THE SUN

Spanning fifteen years of artistic practice, this monograph derives its title from a 1913 avant-garde Cubo-Futurist opera celebrating the demise of the sun. It confronts us with the speculative state of reality after the end of the world, a barren
ontological wasteland in which artifacts have lost their utility. In his work, Xavier Mary is concerned with the dreams and nightmares of modernity, resulting from its inherently industrial nature. The sense of an impending apocalypse or total destr
uction seems particularly topical for the current times. Where the Promethean nature of technology typically allowed humans to liberate themselves from the whims of nature (such as the limited availability of sunlight), this gift for self-preservatio
n has now given way to the threat of self-annihilation. And yet, in the zero point of the apocalypse, an ontological truth is revealed: everything suddenly manifests itself in its inexorable materiality, a ghostly cosmos of autonomous objects.