sylvain barberot - Skull #2

A cast of a human skull made in epoxy resin and covered with 24-karat gold leaf.

Here, as in these works, time is frozen by using the skull as an eternal, immutable, and fixed support. Temporalities confront each other, and the darkness of the idea we have of death bends before the brilliance of the gold leaf, its glow reflecting light.

An artwork is, by its essence, vanity. It reflects the artist's desire to objectify himself to survive time and responds to the vanity of the artist's demiurge idea. Memory is not fixed; it remains to come, never anchoring itself in an infinity. Its disappearance is its only recourse.

An international artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion.

Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that binds our body to the world. However, while our culture strives to engrave history with a chisel, I devote myself to inhibiting, deconstructing, or even erasing my own memory.
A vast undertaking, the exercise of forgetting…

The body is merely the support of this memory on which it depends, even necessitates. It builds it, shapes it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis, from the Greek for the recall of memory, is something I pursue to better detach myself from it.