The basic forms that surround us are at the heart of Xavier Mary’s work: a practice in which the paradigm of minimalism swings towards a universe between simulation and industrial materials. His installations, often accompanied by music and lighting effects, reinvent the postulates of conceptual art, influenced by the alternative and digital cultures of the 1990s and 2000s (techno, computer-generated images, rave-parties, video games…). The Ritournelles series is one of the starting points for this approach. Starting from a simple, geometric form that can be found in a variety of contexts – motifs from oriental carpets, textile logos, arcade terminals … – he isolates it, replicates it in a series of different materials, fits it together. Repetition plays a central role, as in Brancusi’s Colonne sans fin or axis mundi, in which the entanglement of motifs creates the junction between heaven and earth. Ritournelle XL shows us just how irreducible our reality is, made up of the repetition of motifs. As part of a process of interlocking and redeployment, it also confronts us with the architecture of the site. (Genaro Marcos)