Sylvain Barberot - Jouir - marbre gravé

“to enjoy” comes from a series of works titled “epitaph.” They are a poetic way of embracing death with poetry by choosing a word selected to sublime it.

In this work, a marble plaque with undulating, almost organic veins stands like a fragment torn from time. Its surface, marked by gray and ivory strata, 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 any existence.

At the heart of this petrified matter, one word: jouir (to enjoy). Carved deeply, it is not content to be inscribed—it is hollowed out, as if one must chip away at the stone itself to make the meaning emerge. The gold leaf gleam catches the light with an almost sacred intensity. It emphasizes the contours of the engraving, summoning a Funeral Aesthetic. This precious illumination echoes 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 mourning is anticipated, intensity appears; where stone evokes silence, the word calls for experience, for the body, for the lived moment. The work thus performs a discreet yet powerful reversal: it does not deny death, it accompanies it with a mandate to live fully.

Placed within the Épitaphe series, this piece offers a poetic approach to finitude. Each selected 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 preserves, amplifies, transforms. Jouir becomes less a word than a living relic, a luminous trace left at the heart of matter, like a final flare in the face of the inevitable.

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, 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, even requires. It builds it, forms it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis translates from Greek as the rising of memory, for my part I hunt it down to better separate from it."