This summer, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain presents monographic exhibitions of two essential artists of the French scene: Françoise Pétrovitch at MO.CO. and Jean-Marie Appriou at MO.CO. Panacée. At the same time, the exhibition of MO.CO. Esba's 2025 graduates, curated by Sophie Lapalu, will take over the remarkable heritage site of Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine.

Jean-Marie Appriou is an alchemist in the medieval sense of the word: he gives form to the formless and questions materiality by exploring the link between Man and the cosmos. He engraves human, animal or plant figures on paper, models clay, casts aluminium and bronze, murmurs to the breath of glass and fuses volcanic stones.

Steeped in myths and legends, his universe navigates between the infinitely small and the infinitely large. His works, populated by hybrid creatures, "exonauts", and figures drawn from painting, literature or science fiction, compose poetic fictions in which plants become invasive, where the eye slides from the primordial soup to the stars.

The exhibition La cinquième essence (The Fifth Essence) gives the artist the opportunity to deploy the full richness of his sculptural practice — aluminium, bronze, glass, clay — in resonance with the architecture of MO.CO. Panacée, designed around a patio. This setting becomes the vessel for the four elements underlying his works: water, earth, air and fire.

To these elements is added ether, the fifth essence of ancient and medieval alchemy: this invisible element that fills the void, that is both everything and nothing, and that brings the others to life. This is how Jean-Marie Appriou conceives of sculpture: as a quest for balance between fullness and emptiness, mass and lightness — another way of inhabiting the living.

https://www.moco.art/fr