Jean-Marie Appriou’s deep fascination with the poetics of evolutionary  processes unravels ideas around origin stories, speculative  futures, science, magic, and mythology. The gravitational pull of all  these concepts is anchored in Appriou’s exploration of the medium  of sculpture both from material and historical perspectives. Appriou  experiments with the textures, patinas, and reflections of materials  such as aluminum, bronze, and glass. Sometimes, the works  preserve marks of fingerprints and other ghostly gestures from the  physical process of making and molding them. These vestiges subtly  highlight how, even in a digitally permeated world, human touch is  a powerful marker of transformation. 

Transmitters depicts skinny, naked, androgynous humanoids that are  always rendered wearing a glass helmet. These child astronaut  characters, with their stunningly vulnerable presence, represent the  inherited fragility of the future but also the persistence of hope and  the necessity of courage. Flamingo 3 emphasizes deep time through  their bird subjects’ ancient lineage. Like the astronauts, these beings  migrate. The flamingos are also particularly significant here due  to their preferences for living together in large colonies and for the  environment in which they thrive: shallow, warm waters. Each  character plays an important part in this primordial Flamingo Soup by emphasizing a return to the quintessence of life and humanity in  order to open up the possibility of envisioning new worlds. 

Courtesy of the artist and C L E A R I N G