Jean-Marie Appriou
Duarte Sequeira (Portugal), Jun – Sep/24
The gallery Duarte Sequeira is a modern structure, built on a hillside in northern Portugal, in the vicinity of the historic Monastery of St. Martin of Tibães, a place where the Benedictine rule of silence, obedience, poverty, and prayer were followed. This tranquil, picturesque landscape, with its rich history, provides the stage for Jean-Marie Appriou’s latest exhibition.
Facing the entrance of the gallery, and dominating the space, stands the child astronaut, a recurrent figure in Appriou’s work. For this exhibition, he drew inspiration from the painting ‘Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fish’, by the nineteenth-century Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Böcklin. Cast in iron, the child wears a warm-yellow glass headpiece, which the viewer reads as a space helmet, or a deep-sea diving helmet, or a saint’s halo — or perhaps all three.
Opposite are four maritime creatures, a mix of giant fish, a seal, and a narwhal, wrapped and elevated in kelp, as if they were representations of mermaids and sea gods in fairy tales stories and epic texts. The heads of these creatures are realistic and made with smooth and transparent surfaces, but their bodies appear to have been engulfed by material, imprinted with Appriou’s hands. They display the same torsion and tactility expressed in the work of Camille Claudel and Alberto Giacometti, creating an effect where bodies and limbs interweave into one another and metamorphose into new, fantastical forms.
These creatures are not strangers to each other. Appriou repeats the same figures and characters, like actors in drama series, with each exhibition proposing a different plot. They have been displayed in gardens, art galleries, public spaces, and cultural sites around the world. The child astronaut, when placed amidst the cloisters and frescos of Villa Medici in Rome, tells a very different story from when the surroundings are the uniform, modernist, reflective white interiors of Duarte Sequeira.
Is the child astronaut preaching to the fish underwater? Perhaps she is in space, aboard a rocket, or, in keeping with the biblical theme, waiting patiently in purgatory – the infinitely bright blurred room – for a revelation from a deceased loved one, who then comes back to life. Appriou blends cultural references from science fiction, Greek and Egyptian mythologies, symbolism, and biblical narratives — elements drawn from the breadth of our belief systems and values. He brings the past into the present and he projects the present into the future, once the present has connected with our own experiences and memories.
Duarte Sequeira, established in 2019, builds on the legacy of the gallery Mario Sequeira, which exhibited works by some of the most important artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Georg Baselitz, Gerard Richter, Anselm Kiefer. Duarte Sequeira, however, has taken a different path from his father, focusing on a younger and more diverse generation of artists. In the past five years, he has expanded to represent eight artists and opened two new locations: one in Seoul (2022) and another in London (2024).
Ana Teles for London Art Walk
August 2024