selected works

In his new painting series Asperges, Xavier Mazzarol revisits the unique story between painter Édouard Manet and collector Charles Ephrussi. In 1880, Ephrussi commissioned a still life from Manet, La botte d’asperges for 800 francs but ultimately paid 1,000 francs as a gesture of generosity. In response, Manet sent a second, smaller canvas with a single asparagus, accompanied by the note: “One was missing from your bunch.”

In Asperges, Mazzarol creates 25 large-scale oil paintings of vertically standing asparagus, mirroring the exact number in La botte d’asperges by Manet, shifting the focus from the collective bunch to newly revealed singularities. 

This individualization also draws inspiration from Georges Bataille’s analysis, which observes a reversal in Manet’s work: “Manet, in painting still lifes, gave them an intense life, while his portraits sometimes appeared as inanimate as objects.” 

Press release about Between exhibition at xavierlaboulbenne gallery

Is it the Apocalypse when forests burn and bodies sink in the sea? Then what could be the meaning of another art object? To decorate the victor’s surroundings? To monumentalize authority? To preach to the already convinced? For a victim to mark his own journey – but are we not all collateral damage, if not actors of our own demise? Are new forms and textures the abstract expression of internalized conflicts and experiences, the one with the crushing mechanism of capitalist desire and subsequential inflation of physical disease? While the aesthetic convention is concealment, can illness become a figure or metaphor?

Within this conflict and “Against Interpretation”, Xavier Mazzarol expands his production of sculptural objects for the second solo-exhibition presented at the gallery, dissolving the boundaries between industrial and natural, artwork and design product.

On the threshold of the space sits the aluminium skeleton of a dysfunctional machine with the pure metal shine of technology: Between, 2019, aluminium, 70 x 20 x 170 cm. This stylised reminder of the ubiquitous pfand container, gateway to the sorting and recycling process, conjures the masculinist materiality of Minimalism and its nihilistic epistemology of consumerism.

Cold Song, 2019, glass, variable dimensions; five plates with different shapes and patterns of up-cycled water bottles, sourced in Berlin and melted in the Czech Republic, lay on the wall. The human proportions create organic silhouettes with changing light reflections and shadows that counter the static experience of the viewer.

D’Enfer, 2019, glass, polymer, wood, 120 x 100 x 195 cm; on a massive column of manufactured empty glass bottles wrapped with a veil of plastic, hangs a diffracted mirror frame, a square hole in the middle opens to layers of transparencies. “Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.” (Experience and Poverty. Walter Benjamin, 1933)

Through dissection and reconfiguration, handmade and fabricated procedures, Xavier Mazzarol’s praxis of object related and material specific reflects a sensitive observation of the social space and its elusive resonance in the individual body and psyche.

Text by Xavier Laboulbenne 

Fall Action is an open project consisting of professional stunt performers standing or walking at several locations scattered around the public space at differing moments, and collapsing on themselves, as if suffering from sudden loss of consciousness. Subsequent to their fall, they remain for some time on the ground, inanimate.

Fall Action displays the sudden and dramatic full stop of one’s body and the enigmatic aura surrounding the situation.

Blurring the line that separates art and life, the action vividly merges with its surroundings, unannounced nor officially communicated, resulting in a possibly improvised dialogue between the faller and members of the public, who unknowingly become actors in the scene as the rescuers.

For “Between Points”, three unannounced Fall Action(s) will take place at various locations on the river bank, each enacted by a different stunt performer, synchronized with the passage of the boat during its tour.

With live performances by Ed Atkins, Juliette Blightman, Stephanie Comilang, Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano, Jessie Holmes, Tarren Johnson, Sebastian Lütgert a.k.a Robert Luxemburg, Xavier Mazzarol, Reto Pulfer and Günter Schickert.

curated by The Performance Agency 

Some politely call it “turbulent times”, others strongly feel that fundamental rights, free circulation and societal advancement are crumbling, while elemental requisites such as a home and work are becoming the privilege of a generation.  Against morose fatalism, the artist observes social behavior and organizes pessimism.  Five singular works with oblique correspondences of form or motif that question the familiar, unhinged domesticity and parallel economy constitute Xavier Mazzarol’s one-person exhibition.

Following the basic undertaking of collecting beer bottles, like the ubiquitous urban figure of the peddler, a paradigm of hedonistic culture, the artist creates a grid composition then melted the recipients in a glass oven. “Penner” (green), (brown), glass, 2017, variable dimension, are a set of translucent planks of different colors that evoke both the flattened imprint of the household object and ancient stained glass.

“Glück”, 2017, aluminum, synthetic jacket, variable dimension, a ceiling bound telescopic aluminum arm drags in circular motions an empty winter jacket on the floor; the tragic and solemn movement rotates like the vicious circle of homelessness or encampment and its exhausting research of survival places and activities.

“Home in transit”, 2016, metal, gas cylinder, plastic tube, 159 x 180 x 72 cm, is a metal kitchen unit with sink and ignition gas burners, fixed topsy-turvy on the wall like an abstract geometric painting, the brutal and ominous reversal recalls salient gestures of Arte Povera.

Taken and distorted, the everyday becomes here “Piece of evidence” and the active expression of our modernity.  Away from the usual somber tone of socio-critical artwork, this exhibition exudes a sense of buoyancy in the confrontation and reinterpretation of heterogeneous elements, exploring the subtle distinction between art and life.

Xavier Laboulbenne

Stand to Pee / Solo Exhibition / Berlin (2015)

Stand to Pee

Today, in our digital age, it has become common sense that we are driven towards perfection of our organs. We are not only striving to overcome the limits of their function, we are aware that our tools and technological gadgets are the means for that perfection. Yet, one of the historical stages in this regard was doubtlessly the control over fire. According to Freud, this event of gaining control is irreducibly connected not only to the human capability to stand peeing, but also to homosexuality and the gender divide. From Freud’s perspective the act of standing to pee on fire  was, also because of the anatomical exclusion of woman, a sexual act amongst man, “an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition.” Accordingly, the condition to gain control over fire was only possible, if the already standing man would be able to repress their own homosexual desire and lust, to extinguish the fire through lustfully urinating on it. “The person to renounce this desire and spare the fire,” Freud writes, “was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use.” In analogy to this condition, Freud also believed that the historical fact, that woman had, for a long time, been made guardians of fire, was connected to their anatomic inability to be sexually tempted to pee standing. With the historical enfoldment of our desire to reach a perfection of our organs and to overcome all anatomical limits, however, not only all such differences between man and woman or sexual preferences seem culturally to loose their significance. The fate of our bodies is, as Baudrillard once noted, to become prostheses. And as prosthetic organisms that are intrinsically connected to our technological gadgets we are also about to become shameless. In a clean and hygienic, transparent and yet utterly controlled digital world, the ugly smell of our excrements and excessive waste seems to be gone. The fire controlled by digital code, seems eternal and since the sexes have already been hacked the differences between gender are as obsolete as the taboo and the prohibition to pee standing. As a cultural peeing device contemporary art remains one of the last remnants of shameful peeing.

Philipp Kleinmichel

Behaving like Helter-Skelter / Solo Exhibition @ Unosolo, Roma, IT

behaving like helter-skelter

Unosolo is pleased to announce Behaving like Helter-Skelter, the first solo exhibition in Italy by French artist Xavier Mazzarol. For this occasion Mazzarol has conceived and created a new body of works taking inspiration from the manifold significances of a British English term, Helter-Skelter, which has entered our vocabulary because of notorious crime news. It is in fact the title of a song by The Beatles recorded in 1968 whose lyrics inspired the murders committed by Charles Manson and his ‘family’ in California the following year. One of the victims, Sharon Tate, was the wife of Polish-French director, writer and actor Roman Polanski, who directed the film Rosemary’s Baby in the same building where former Beatle John Lennon lived from 1973 on and where he was assassinated in 1980.

Fascinated by this bizarre tangle of real facts and cinematographic fiction Xavier Mazzarol explores and uses the energies suggested by this term and that he feels particularly related to our everyday life: anxiety, excitement, treason, pleasure, fear, lies, conspiracy tangle up determining a state of confusion and disorder, where intuition, fantasy and imagination are the only means to find some sense in the chaos.

Curiosly Helter-Skelter is also the name of a spiralling amusement park slide: Xavier Mazzarol intends to unroll his personal spiral of emotions in the space of unosolo. Artworks, different from each other to create intentional collisions, are, at the same time, deeply related like comunicating vessels thanks to the space they are confronted to.