Sylvain Barberot - à portée de main

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

The surface, covered with paint enriched to 30% with pure gold, does not seek ostentatious brilliance but a restrained light, almost interior. The gold acts here as a reveal of value as much as of memory. It sacralizes not only the object; it highlights the preciousness of the bond, of the shared instant, 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 burn commits the work to a process of continual transformation. The wax melts, the flame wavers, and little by little the object disappears, carrying away with it a visible part of the composition. What was given “within reach” becomes elusive.

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

International artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion. Memory, in my view, is the essential element that links our body to the world. However, and while our culture strives to engrave history with a chisel, 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 on which it depends, indeed requires. It builds it, models it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis is translated from the Greek as the ascent of memory, I, for my part, hunt it down to better part with it.