Jean-Marie Appriou

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi presents CANTO INFINITO, a solo exhibition by Jean-Marie Appriou for the Project Space of Palazzo Strozzi. Curated by Arturo Galansino, the project brings together a group of new works offering an insight into Appriou’s artistic practice, a distinctive voice of his generation in the redefinition of the idea of scultpure in contemporary art. The work by Jean-Marie Appriou is characterized by an experimental engagement with materials such as aluminum, bronze, glass, clay, and wax. Through a highly tactile approach, he shapes figures that inhabit an ambiguous territory between the human, the animal, and the vegetal. Appriou’s sculptures draw on references ranging from archaic mythologies to science fiction and contemporary culture. Horses, serpents, marine creatures, and hybrid beings populate a symbolic universe in which forms appear suspended between earth and water, darkness and light, permanence and change. Often monumental in scale, these figures nevertheless establish an intimate relationship with the viewer, conveying a sense of proximity that heightens their enigmatic and sometimes unsettling presence. The title of the exhibition CANTO INFINITO (“infinite song”) evokes the idea of a continuous flow without beginning or end, suggesting a dimension in which time, matter, and imagination remain in constant transformation. Conceived as an initiatory journey articulated through the rooms of the Project Space, the exhibition subtly draws on the legacy of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri—not as an illustrative model, but as a cultural and symbolic horizon. Appriou’s practice also engages with a broader constellation of literary and mythological sources, which emerge not as fixed references but as presences embodied in sculptural matter and integrated into a spatial sequence. His figures do not illustrate stories but suggest moments of passage and transition.