Sylvain Barberot - à portée de main

This work is the mold of a child’s hand painted with a diluted gold paint to 30 percent purity. It presents itself as an imprint suspended between presence and disappearance. Made from a mold of a child’s hand, the resin sculpture captures with troubling precision the lines, folds, and fragility of a gesture still in development. It freezes an intimate moment, that of growth underway, a body already changing at the very moment one tries to keep its trace.

The surface, covered with a paint enriched with 30 percent pure gold, does not seek ostentatious brilliance but a restrained, almost interior light. The gold acts here as a revealer of value as much as memory. It not only sacralizes the object; it underscores the preciousness of the bond, of the shared moment, of what, precisely, cannot be retained.

In the palm, a candle is held. Lit, it introduces an irreversible temporality at the very heart of the sculpture. Its slow burning commits the work to a process of continuous transformation. The wax melts, the flame flickers, and little by little the object disappears, carrying away a visible part of the composition. What was given “within reach” becomes unfathomable.

Thus, the work articulates tension and delicacy between preservation and loss. It questions our desire to hold onto what escapes us, to fix what, by nature, is meant to transform. The child’s hand, symbol of the future and becoming, here holds its own disappearance, like a silent meditation on the passing of time and on the fragile beauty of human ties.

Internationally renowned artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion. Memory is, in my view, the indispensable element that binds our body to the world. Yet, while our culture strives to carve history with a 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, even is in need of. It builds it, molds it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis is, from the Greek, the ascent of memory, I stalk it to better part from it.