Jean-Marie APPRIOU (born 1986) - Lot 104

Jean-Marie APPRIOU (born 1986) Seal shell, 2024 Glazed stoneware H. 17.5 cm - W. 26 cm - D. 17.5 cm On the occasion of an exceptional sale in aid of Greenpeace, Jean-Marie Appriou created a totem: a mineral echo of the aquatic universe. First modeled in clay, shaped by the artist's hands with intuitive precision, the original form gives rise to a mold, the matrix of a future body. From this mold is born Seal shell, a work in glazed stoneware, an ancestral material kneaded with water and fire, which rises like an apparition from the forgotten depths. At the heart of this vision is a being: the monk seal, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals. A discreet guardian of wild coasts, it embodies a fragile presence, a fading link between humans and the ocean world. Appriou's depiction is not naturalistic, but allegorical, almost spectral, as if the animal has emerged from an ancient dream, carrying messages from another time. Inspired by the paintings of Arnold Böcklin, in particular Saint Anthony Preaching to the Fishes, the artist turns the gaze away from the man who speaks to the sea, to the monk seal who questions us. Not to listen to a sermon, but to face the viewer and invite him to hear its threatened presence, its almost extinguished silence. Stoneware, metamorphosed by firing and iridescent glazes, becomes skin, mineral flesh, the imprint of a changing world. It preserves within itself the memory of the elements - sea, salt, fire - and gives shape to this creature-witness, messenger of an ecosystem in peril. For the work is a threshold. A crack through which consciousness slips. "We all come from the sea," Appriou reminds us. And it is perhaps through the eyes of the monk seal, in its majestic solitude, that we can glimpse what we are in danger of losing: the fragile beauty of a world from which we came, and which we have forgotten to protect.