Jean-Marie Appriou

"On the eve of future renaissance"

Infating the hallucinatory myth, the harvest is reaped on the eve of a future renaissance.

What we are looking at could be deemed a diachronic neo-pastoral scene of two dimensions. In each, actors bear a resemblance to the watersheds of Western art history, yet there is a certain cool distance in their gazes, craggy roughness and coltishness in their manoeuvre. The use of an ingenious sculptural experimentation dislocates them from iconicity. As if in a garden of delight, a feld, or an opium den, the actors are lying, crouching, whirling, reassembled on walls and foors. A still life replete with inanimate matter manifesting length, breadth and depth. The scene isn’t entirely linear. It’s closer to a system of exchange. We built them, but we do not understand them. We are familiar with their essential attributes, but because they are composites they are paradoxical.

The idea of phenomena is implicit to the diachronic. Stepping out of the two dimensional barrior, ideas, transformations, and states of being exhibit semi-fantastic portrayals of respiration and hysterical fever. The act of becoming and energy production is crucially, and fundamentally, at work here. Milk in its jug. A germinating crop, yoga at its gate/bridge/arch. Crayon graffttied rainbow sirens exude a kind of ambiguity, or indifference. Stuck in time and movement, they are adorned by aluminium cast crickets, fragile lilies, and glass fy pneus feeding off of marbled plastifed heads.

Across the way, the new Arcadia suggests inversion, reciprocal interference, and sardonic transposition. An ox is cast in its realist pose as a leopard descends the wall in crouching mode. Nearby glass blown muscade nuts allude to alien seeding. Further beyond, more unorthodox females pose in their dresses. A sphere reposes on a bed of plum velvet. But it is acrylic painted clay. The sphere could be described as the alchemical portal, and is the result of equal distribution of stresses in the envelope. It also suggests the frst stage of the living cell of the microsphere. Jennifer Teets, 2017.