sylvain barberot - Skull #2

A mold of a human skull made in epoxy resin and covered with 24-carat gold leaf.

Here and in these works time is frozen by using the skull as a timeless, unchanging, and fixed support. Temporalities confront each other, and the darkness of the notion one has of death yields to the brilliance of the gold leaf, reflecting light with its shine.

An artwork is, by essence, vanity. It reflects the artist’s desire to objectify himself in order to outlive time and answers the vanity of the artist-demiurge’s idea. Memory is not fixed; it remains to come, never anchoring in infinity. Its disappearance is its only recourse.

Internationally recognized artist whose work rests on the dichotomy between memory and oblivion.
Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that links our body to the world. Yet, while our culture strives to engrave history with a chisel, I devote myself to inhibiting, deconstructing, or even erasing my own memory. A vast undertaking, the act of forgetting…
The body is only the support for this memory, on which it depends, even requires. It builds it, shapes it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis, from Greek, means the ascent of memory, for my part I hunt it down to better detach myself from it.