Sylvain Barberot - Kiss me

“Kiss me” is the mold of a human skull made of caramel. This skull is suspended 1.7 meters above the ground and 37 cm from the wall in such a way that the viewer can lick it, kiss it. Embrace death in the hope of making it disappear. It is therefore a non-permanent work doomed not to survive time.

The work Kiss fits, with remarkable acuity, into the tradition of vanities, while offering a deeply contemporary and participatory reinterpretation of it. At first glance, the object imposes a troubling presence: a human skull, the universal symbol of mortality, is here reproduced with quasi-anatomical precision, yet transfigured by an unexpected material, caramel. This substance, both seductive and perishable, introduces an immediate tension between attraction and repulsion.

The choice of caramel is not insignificant. It evokes the world of childhood, sugary pleasure, immediate desire. Yet this sweetness is applied to the representation of death, creating a striking contrast. Where classical vanities opposed wealth and fugacity, Kiss stages a dialectic between consumption and disappearance. The spectator is no longer simply confronted with the image of death: they are invited to participate physically.

The participatory dimension of the work constitutes its most radical gesture. Suspended at mouth height, the skull becomes accessible, almost offered. The title, Kiss, introduces an essential ambiguity: is it a kiss, an act of affection and intimacy, or a more primitive contact, the tongue that tastes, samples, alters? By licking the work, the spectator engages their own body in a process of transformation. They become an agent of erosion, an actor in the progressive disappearance of the form.

Thus, the work does not merely represent vanitas: it performs it. Each interaction reduces the object, distorts it, until its possible annihilation. Time, typically suggested in traditional vanities, is here accelerated and made visible. Degradation is no longer abstract; it is tangible, almost intimate. This act of consumption also evokes a form of symbolic cannibalism: to ingest the skull is to incorporate death, to make it momentarily one’s own.

Moreover, Kiss interrogates the relationship between work and spectator in the contemporary context. Where art is often protected, sanctified, here it is vulnerable, exposed, dependent on the actions of the public. The work accepts its own end as a condition of its existence. It is complete only in its programmed disappearance.

Ultimately, Kiss offers a piercing meditation on human finitude, transforming a classic motif into a sensory and collective experience. Between desire and destruction, sweetness and the macabre, it recalls that all pleasure is ephemeral, and that disappearance is not merely an idea, but a process in which we participate, sometimes with troubling delectation.