Sylvain Barberot - Jouir - marbre gravé

"to enjoy" originates from a series of works entitled "epitaph." They are a poetic way of embracing death with poetry by choosing a word selected to sublimize it.

In this work, a marble plaque with undulating, almost organic veining stands like a fragment torn from time. Its surface, marked by gray and ivory-layered strata, evokes both geological sedimentation and the slow inscription of memory. Nothing here is smooth: the irregular edge, almost accidental, recalls rupture, finitude, the incompleteness inherent to every existence.

At the heart of this petrified matter, a word: to enjoy. Engraved deeply, it is not merely inscribed—it is hollowed out, as if one must begin to carve the stone itself to bring forth meaning. The 24-carat gold leaf catches the light with an almost sacred intensity. It emphasizes the contours of the engraving, invoking a funerary aesthetic. This precious illumination is not without recalling the gilded letters of funerary stelae, where the name and the words persist after the body’s disappearance.

The choice of the verb to enjoy acts as a central tension. Associated with death by the epigraphic device, it shifts expectations: where mourning is anticipated, intensity emerges; where the stone evokes silence, the word calls for experience, for the body, for the lived moment. The work thus performs a discreet yet powerful reversal: it does not deny death, it accompanies it with an injunction to live fully.

Part of the Epigraph series, this piece offers a poetic approach to finitude. Each chosen word becomes an attempt to sublimize disappearance, not by softening it, but by opposing it with a form of existential density. Here, the stone does not close off: it preserves, it amplifies, it transforms. To enjoy thus becomes less a word than a vibrant relic, a luminous trace left at the heart of matter, like a last gleam facing the inevitable.

International artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion. Memory, in my view, is the essential element that binds our body to the world. Yet, as our culture strives to engrave history with a chisel, 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 depends, even needs. It builds, shapes, and transforms it. And if anamnesis derives from the Greek for the ascent of remembrance, for my part I pursue it in order to better part from it.