Barberot Sylvain - FRAGILE

This work is part of a series in which the self-portrait moves away from direct representation to inhabit the realm of experience. Composed of three vertical mirrors, whose backing polish is partially removed, it reveals the word fragile through luminosity and transparency. The word does not present itself immediately: it emerges, withdraws, depends on the angle, on the presence and on the viewer’s movement.

The mirror, traditionally associated with self-recognition, becomes here a space of uncertainty. The reflection is not stable: fragmented by the tripartite division, altered by the light that passes through it, it oscillates between appearance and erasure. The artist does not reveal himself frontally; he disperses, diffracts, giving way to an image of the self that is unstable, conditioned by the gaze of the other.

The word fragile, engraved in the very material of the mirror, acts as a discreet revelation. It does not compel itself as a statement, but as an underlying, almost structural datum. By removing the backing to make the light appear, the work performs an act of unveiling: what is normally hidden — vulnerability — becomes here the passage point between the visible and the invisible.

Thus, the self-portrait is no longer limited to an image, but extends to a dispositif. It includes the spectator’s body, caught in the reflection, seized in this tension between visibility and disappearance. The artist offers less a representation of himself than a state: that of an identity traversed, unstable, exposed.

In this minimalist economy of means — mirror, light, word — the work asserts that any artistic practice is a continuous self-portrait, where fragility is not a confession but a condition.

International artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion. Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that links our body to the world. Yet, as our culture strives to engrave history with a burin, I strive to inhibit, to deconstruct, even to erase my own memory. A vast undertaking, the exercise of forgetting… The body is only the support of this memory on which it relies, even depends. It shapes it, models it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis is Greek for a rising memory, for my part I hunt it down in order to better part from it.