Barberot Sylvain - FRAGILE

This work is part of a series in which the self-portrait moves beyond direct representation to inhabit the realm of experience. Composed of three vertical mirrors, with the backing partially removed, it reveals, through luminous transparency, the word fragile. The latter does not reveal itself immediately: it emerges, eludes, depends on the angle, on the viewer’s presence and movement.

The mirror, traditionally associated with self-recognition, becomes here a space of uncertainty. The reflection is not stable: fractured by the tripartite division, altered by the light that passes through it, it oscillates between appearance and erasure. The artist does not present himself face on; he disperses, diffracts, yielding an image of oneself that is unstable, conditioned by the gaze of others.

The word fragile, engraved in the very material of the mirror, acts as a discreet revelation. It does not impose itself as a declaration, but as an underlying, almost structural datum. By removing the backing to reveal the light, the work performs a gesture of unveiling: what is usually hidden — vulnerability — becomes here the passage point of the visible.

Thus, the self-portrait is no longer limited to an image, but extends to a dispositif. It includes the spectator’s body, captured in the reflection, caught 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 minimal 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 forgetting. Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that binds our body to the world. However, and while our culture strives to engrave history with the burin, I strive to inhibit, to deconstruct, even to erase my own memory. A vast undertaking, the practice of forgetting… The body is only the support of this memory of which it is dependent, or even in need. It constructs, models, and transforms it. And if anamnesis derives from the Greek for the ascent of memory, I chase it to better part from it.