Horizons is a monumental aluminum project started by Jean-Marie Appriou in 2022. It is through a large-scale boat carrying two characters "austronauts" traveling through the stars and ages. The sail is empty of breath, as if weightless, just like the floating boat in a world empty of waves. It is a universe filled with contraction that is revealed, where the heavy metal seems as light as a papyrus construction, as much as this motionless scene that metaphorically depicts the image of the Egyptian boat, a vessel leading Man from sunrise to the symbolic sunset of life.
The boat and more largely the theme of navigation is central in Jean-Marie Appriou’s work and researches. He sees there the idea of passage: as if the sea and its immensity were a portal to the path of discovery, to the journey towards the unknown through which Man sees himself, transcending his bodily envelope to enter a state of elevated consciousness. The influence of ancient Egyptian sculpture is visible throughout his work, notably the “Egyptian step”; a hieratic and timeless expression, or the salient features of his "astronaut" faces, and is also revealed through his body of work dedicated to boats, that he has been developing since 2018. These projects have been presented to the Villa Medici (Rome, It) in 2022, to Lafayette Anticipations (Paris, Fr) in 2021, and to the Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris, FR) in 2019 and has completed a public commission for the ENS Saclay (Saclay, Fr) in 2021.
The ancient Egyptian boat, carved in wood or made of papyrus and placed in tombs to accompany the deceased on their journey to the afterlife; feeds the imagination of the artist and constitutes one of the central inspirations of the Horizons project. In Egyptian mythology, the sun god Re moves across the sky aboard two golden vessels, one to journey by day, the other to journey by night. These solar ships inspired that of Kheops, which was buried besides the pharaoh. The perpetual cycle of sunrise and sunset is associated with the cycle of life and death; hoping to be reborn forever, the dead join the race of the Solar boat or "race of the sun", that of the god Re, through the night and the underground world to the eastern horizon.
Unlike in ancient times, when the planet was still a huge "land" to be travelled, since the end of the Second World War, the quest of space in search of of exo-planets has become a frantic quest, thanks in particular to the discoveries made possible by the Hubble Observatory and by the James Webb Telescope with its silver dress and its solar panels deployed like a sail.
The two youthful and androgynous astronauts in the boat symbolize the quintessence of humanity, the ideals that bring us back to our origins. Jean-Marie Appriou "houses" these characters in a protective bubble allowing them to create their own atmosphere and protect themselves from mystery and possibly hostile immensity. These two characters, their eyes fixed on the distance can be, according to the artist, "exo-humans" in search of an advanced humanity, of a sharper state of consciousness.
Horizon also echoes two major works in the history of art which are references in his work as a sculptor: Dante and Virgil in Hell, also known as La barque de Dante by Eugène Delacroix (1822) and L’île aux Morts by Bocklin (1880).
Appriou’s work has been exhibited at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles; the Abattoirs museum, Toulouse; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Consortium Museum, Dijon; The Villa Medici, Roma and the Biennale de Lyon. He was invited by the Public Art Fund to present a group of sculptures at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast entrance to Central Park in New York, at the Château de Versailles and at the Vienna Biennale.