JEAN-MARIE APPRIOU

Mortal beings and deities coexist in Appriou’s works. With aluminium, bronze, glass, clay, and wax, he materialises the wondrous worlds where human beings, animals, and plants inhabit. His sculptures take shape as the cold, cutting metals transform into hot, liquified forms. From ancient Egyptian mythologies and the pre-Raphaelites, to science fictions, mainstream cinema, and comic books, the artist draws his inspirations from a variety of sources. And so astronauts, divers, and beekeepers from antiquity or futuristic world often star in his works.

In Liquid Metal Dream, the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Perrotin Shanghai, Appriou creates a dream of temporal disorder. Much like The Sleeping Beauty, the narrative unfolds with a series of mirrors that represent life in a castle, a forest of thorns, and a woman in an enchanted slumber. The artist reinterprets The Briar Rose series by the British painter Sir Edward Burne Jones, rendering the exhibition hall as a tranquil world with different times exist simultaneously. Fractured reliefs of the thorny ruin symbolise the past, while the blooming roses represent the future. In a garden where plants at once survive and perish, time begins to circulate, and the changing seasons become irrelevant.

Levitation is another theme that Appriou returns to in his works. A dreamlike, anti-gravitational pull levitates the woman’s body above the aquatic plants, revealing the world underneath the water. And a liquid materiality is evident when one observes the mirror surface. Reflection remains clear in the polished centre, but warps and fades as it expands to the edges, as if eroded by the surrounding vegetation. As in Alice Through the LookingGlass, a novel dear to Appriou’s heart, the mirror serves not only as a counterpart and reimagination of reality, but also as a portal to another world, a pathway to dreams. Between solid and liquid, virtuality and reality, lucidity and dreamscape, the artist grapples with the uncanny by means of extraordinary alchemical transformations.

The subjects of Appriou’s works are the Adam and Eve in realms of their own. Informed by theatre, the artist accessorises the unsullied bodies and mold them into different characters. Yet these characters, which consist of allegories and symbols, are not here to fulfill a conventional narrative. They are what is above and beyond. For instance, the astronaut points to a dreamed future and an elsewhere beyond the confines of our planet, whereas the beekeeper is an homage to the Earth, a guardian as opposed to a wayfarer. And Sleeping Beauty is a reflection upon the passage of time.

Appriou’s work also centres around the treatment of sculptural surfaces. In Sleeping Beauty, he captures the movement of pleats without imitating the texture of fabric, and takes great care to communicate a sense of softness and a specific skin tone of the heroine. He has never produced any work that is mirror-polished, as he insists that ‘the sensuality of the material must be visible.’ For the same reason, every single rose that decorates the heroine’s dress is modelled and made by hand, leaving upon the petals faint traces of the fingers.

‘This is what’s complicated about sculpturing. If you continue to modelling, where is the right place to stop? Michelangelo’s notion of non-finito is very important. Because it is about capturing the dynamics of an arm, rather than defining the arm as an idealised form from one end to the other, as Bernini or Canova would have done,’ mused Appriou.

Appriou’s understanding on the sculpture’s volume also follows the teachings of Michelangelo. For him, the space occupied by sculptures is at once void and full, and the undelineated presence is a basis upon which the intertextuality of different works is built. Like a rabbit hole, a beckoning kaleidoscope, or the opening line of a story previously untold, this exhibition leads us toward a new world and an uncharted tributary of time. Instead of perfecting imitations of the physical world, the artist hypothesises and animates a subject of beauty.

Press release courtesy Perrotin, Text: Li Jingyue.