Sylvain Barberot - Jouir - marbre gravé

"jouir" comes from a series of works titled "epitaph". They are a poetry-filled way of embracing death by choosing a word selected to sublime it.

In this work, a marble plaque with rippling, almost organic veins stands like a fragment ripped from time. Its surface, marked by gray and ivory-toned layers, 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: jouir. Carved deep, it is not content to merely be inscribed — it is dug out, as if one had to begin to hollow the stone itself to make its meaning emerge. The 24-karat gold leaf sheen catches the light with an almost sacred intensity. It highlights the contours of the engraving, invoking a funerary aesthetics. This precious illumination is not without recalling the gilded letters of tombstones, where the name and words persist after the body’s disappearance.

The choice of the verb jouir acts as a central tension. Associated with death by the epitaph’s device, it shifts expectations: where one expects mourning, intensity arises; where the stone evokes silence, the word calls for experience, for the body, for the lived moment. The work thus performs a subtle yet powerful reversal: it does not deny death; it accompanies it with a mandate to live fully.

Inscribed in the Épitaphe series, this piece offers a poetic approach to finitude. Each chosen word becomes an attempt to sublime disappearance, not by softening it, but by opposing it with a form of existential density. Here, the stone does not close it off: it retains, amplifies, transforms. Jouir becomes less a word and more a vibrant relic, a luminous trace left at the heart of matter, like a last glint against the inevitable.

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. Yet, as our culture strives to engrave history with a burin, I strive to inhibit, deconstruct, even erase my own memory. The vast undertaking of forgetting... The body is but the support of this memory on which it depends, often requires. It builds it, models it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis translates from Greek as the rising of memory, for my part I hunt it down to better part with it.