Perrotin is thrilled to present Exonaut Horizon, the second solo exhibition by French artist Jean-Marie Appriou at the gallery, and his first in its Paris location. Drawing inspiration from ancient cultures such as Egyptian and Greek mythology, Appriou pushes the boundaries of traditional sculptural techniques by blending diverse materials like aluminum, bronze, marble, glass, and lava. His process begins using clay in his studio, where each piece is meticulously modeled to scale, leaving the artist’s fingerprints as a lasting imprint of his hands-on approach. Spanning works of varying scales—from smaller pieces to monumental sculptures—the exhibition crystallizes technical and conceptual research for more than a decade. The gallery transforms into an immersive mise-en-scène, inviting visitors to step into Appriou’s enigmatic universe.
Russian cosmonauts, American astronauts, European spationauts, Chinese taikonauts... Every culture has its name for those who visit the sky. For Jean-Marie Appriou, they are Exonauts. Fascinating beings with a chrysalis body, or cosmic mummies. Their heads are crystal skulls, with faces blossoming in the center, multiplied as if by mitosis—a cellular division that recalls the first flowering of life. These faces, fractals that playfully take on the role of humanity, also resemble atoms, activating fundamental reactions in their spheres, like those that energized the primordial soup, the chaos of first things. Are these futuristic travelers witnesses of the Great Beginning? Their space is the combination of eras and the creatures they encounter are connected to all worlds.
The exonauts are the explorers of the ultimate, beyond the horizon. Exo is a sound for our time. Exo, like the exoplanets that the powerful James Webb telescope continues to discover, sparking dreams of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Also as in exoskeleton, the external structure of insects and crustaceans, which today can allow us to imagine extraterrestrial forms and new bodies to float in interstellar space. Exo is everything that projects us outward, the ultimate out there, what hides behind the horizon. Every era has its sky. There humans have hidden gods, crystalline spheres, the movement of the stars, little green men, Paradise.
And today? Today, the sky has never held so many promises: our origins, the dilation of time and space, the formation of matter and antimatter, hidden dimensions, multiverses, eternal transformations. Our horizon now lies on the other side of galaxies. Event horizon is what we call the impenetrable mystery, the one we can glimpse on the edges of black holes. There light and matter are absorbed. Everything disappears, completely incorporated. Is it an apocalypse? A Genesis? A door? A reorganizing of the elements? A hidden Divinity? The only thing we know for sure: Here flows the source of secrets.
In this Exonaut Horizon, higher than the seventh heaven, Jean-Marie Appriou places the cradle of the cosmos, the crucible of past and future mysteries. There, time and forms merge, and mythical creatures populate coming civilizations. Fabulous beings and igneous matter, sculpted by the artist, are in a state of suspension, sowing worlds yet to be born, or allowing themselves to be shaped by the breath of the universe, between fecund inspiration and entropic exhalation...
The forms seek each other, waver, are recomposed. Nothing is eternal. Only movement is perpetual. From the edges of multiverses come particles of elementary matter that play with new combinations. The beginnings and ends of worlds are neither creation nor destruction. They form the rhythm of the breath, the ebb and flow of All. Space reveals itself to be the Ocean up above. And its fascinating bestiary is that of the shifting tides of the cosmos.
What is dreamed when we raise our heads is the supreme journey, the one that will liberate us from our smallness, from the poverty of our imagination, from the conspiracy of our reality. Thanks to this exploration, we will become immense. Not more powerful, but more profound.
Text by David Wahl, Writer and Playwright
Born in 1986 in Brest, France
Lives and works in Paris, France
It is with remarkable technical skill that Jean-Marie Appriou takes control of sculptural materials—aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, wax—to envisage fantastical worlds inhabited by human, animal and vegetal figures. Through their skillfully constructed scale, his often imposing works nevertheless maintain an intimate relationship with the viewer, as if to better communicate their disturbing strangeness.
Deeply dreamlike, Appriou’s material universe is imbued with telluric concerns approached from an original perspective: that of the legendary. Horses, snakes, locusts, sharks and seahorses compose a bestiary charged with powerful symbolism. They evolve in a dream realm, a marvelous natural world that becomes a theater of striking characters. Sowers, gatherers, beekeepers and Japanese Ama divers—all represent figures of passage and transformation. The transition between elements—from the aquatic to the aerial, from the underground to the terrestrial—is one of the central themes of the artist's work.
From archaic ages to futuristic civilizations, between dinosaurs and child astronauts, Appriou produces visions on the edge of psychedelia, mixing pop culture and mythologies from Greek and Egyptian antiquity to science fiction. His sculpture combines the allegorical and the sensual, leaving his fingerprints visible on the material. He weaves a paradoxical narrative that unites the past and the future, the ideal and the perceptible, in a series of hallucinatory ecstasies.
More about the artist
