Jean-Marie Appriou – Art Club #35

25.06.2022 - 04.09.2022
Opening: Saturday, 25 June 2022, from 6 pm

Jean-Marie Appriou – Art Club #35

Curator: Pier Paolo Pancotto

These recent creations take up the central figures of his practice, whose plastic universe, deeply dreamlike, is imbued with telluric concerns. Through a great technical mastery, Jean-Marie Appriou seizes the materials of sculpture - aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, wax - to represent fantastic worlds inhabited by human, animal or vegetable figures.

Horses, snakes, locusts, sharks or seahorses compose a bestiary charged with a powerful symbolism, while his figures of sowers, gatherers or beekeepers embody figures of passage and transformation. The transition between the elements - from the aquatic to the aerial, from the underground to the terrestrial - is one of the central themes of the artist's work. His sculpture combines the allegorical and the sensual; the artist likes to leave visible the imprint of his fingers on the material. He weaves a paradoxical narrative that unites the past and the future in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies. In the gardens of the Villa Medici, the presence of Jean-Marie Appriou's work takes on a particular twist.

The visitor is invited to a stroll linking the loggias (Loggia Balthus and Loggia of Cleopatra), the square of the Niobides, the Gypsotheca and the Chamber of Birds, the former private room of Ferdinand de Medici. Between the alcoves, the columned arcades and the mazes of vegetation, the artist "sows" his works imagined in echo to the figures and myths that, for centuries, have populated the gardens of the Villa Medici.

With the support of :

JAN KAPS
EVA PRESENHUBER GALLERY
C L E A R I N G
PERROTIN
MASSIMO DE CARLO