Photo by Maria Thanassa of Stephen Alexander
and Jean-Marie Appriou's The Birth of Venus (2022)
If asked to name my favourite sculptor at the moment, it would have to be the French artist Jean-Marie Appriou [1], who uses all kinds of material - aluminium, bronze, glass, clay, wax, etc. - to create disturbingly strange figures who are sometimes human in appearance, sometimes animal-like, or sometimes vegetal in character, but who are always essentially alien, despite their seemingly terrestrial origin.
Rather than alien, perhaps we might better describe their nature as divine. In other words, perhaps we should think of Appriou's figures as gods. At any rate, one of my favourite works of his is a Venus figure presently on display in London at the Alison Jacques gallery ... [2]
II.
Composed of aluminium and hand blown glass and standing
136 cm in height - that's just under four-and-a-half foot to you and I - the silvery-bodied Venus with a sea-shell cocoon still attached to her back, wears a purple-coloured glass helmet, rather like a fishbowl, so she can breathe as she transitions from an aquatic world beneath the waves to one on dry land [3].
The work, as an object, has a sensual aspect, even though the figure is strangely sexless for a Venus. Without moving a muscle and by incorporating a wide-range of cultural references, it curdles the distinction between a whole series of oppositions; adult/child; male/female; human/nonhuman; mortal/divine; the mythological past/the sci-fi future
And, like the very best artworks, it not only makes one question notions of identity, it affects us and faciliates what Deleuze and Guattari would term "real and unheard of becomings" [4] involving the affirmation of difference and the opening of infinite possibilities.
Just standing in the presence of Appriou's Venus for a few minutes, exposes one to weird forces and flows or what occultists refer to as demonic reality - and that's something I didn't experience even when standing before Botticelli's masterpiece in the Uffizi Gallery.
One leaves the exhibition space a different being to the one who entered (as the Little Greek's photo above illustrates).
Notes
[1] Born in Brittany in 1986, Appriou presently lives and works in Paris. He is represented in London by the Massimo De Carlo Gallery. His page on the gallery's website can be accessed by clicking here.
[2] The piece, entitled The Birth of Venus (2022), forms part of the Last Night I Dreamt of Manderley group exhibition, curated by Daniel Malarkey at Alison Jacques, which runs until the 8th of March. For full details of this exhibition click here. And for my thoughts on it, click here.
[3] One imagines the helmet would be full of an oxygenated liquid, similar to that used by the aliens in the cult British TV series UFO (1970-71).
[4] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 244.
