Barberot Sylvain - MEMORY

In this work from the Self Portrait series, the artist distorts a familiar object—the mirror—to reveal an invisible dimension: its capacity to contain, accumulate, and perhaps lose memory.

The silvering, partially engraved with the word “memory,” becomes a paradoxical surface here. Usually meant to faithfully reflect the image of the world, it is altered, fragile, almost erased. The act of engraving acts like an inscription in the very substance of memory: to write “memory” on a mirror is to inscribe memory into the tool that would bear silent witness to it.

But this mirror no longer reflects fully. Its increasing opacities, obscured or bare areas, suggest saturation. As if every accumulated reflection, every face, every moment, had been deposited into it until it altered its primary function. The mirror, as an involuntary archive of the real, becomes laden with excessive memory—and this memory ends up making it disappear.

In this logic, the work offers a subtle inversion: it is no longer the subject who contemplates themselves in the mirror, but the mirror itself that becomes a self-portrait. A self-portrait not of appearance, but of function and exhaustion. The “self” here is not only that of the artist, but that of the object—a object that, by accumulating too many images, loses its ability to produce them.

Thus, the reflective surface becomes a site of tension between appearance and erasure, between memory and oblivion. When memory is too full, the silvering disappears—and with it, the very possibility of seeing oneself.

International artist whose work rests on the dichotomy between memory and forgetting. Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that binds our body to the world. Yet, as our culture strives to engrave history with the burin, I strive to inhibit, deconstruct, or even erase my own memory. A vast undertaking—the exercise of forgetting… The body is only the support of this memory on which it depends, indeed requires. It builds it, shapes it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis comes from the Greek for “the rising of memory,” I pursue it to better part from it.