Sylvain BARBEROT - Skull #2

Freeze what remains to come
Here and in this work, if time is frozen by using the skull as a timeless, immutable, and fixed support, the skin that covers it, for its part, seems to flow without stopping. The temporalities confront one another, and the darkness of the idea we form of death yields to the brilliance of this material, which approaches ceramic. This material reflects light just as these sheets of gold leaf that carry the object beyond time.
An artwork is, by its very nature, vanity. It reflects the artist’s desire to objectify himself in order to survive time and responds to the vanity of the demiurge-like artist’s idea. Memory is not fixed; it remains to come, never anchoring itself in infinity. Its disappearance is its only recourse.
An international artist whose work rests on the dichotomy that exists between memory and oblivion. Memory, in my view, is the indispensable element that links our body to the world. However, while our culture strives to engrave history with a burin, I strive to inhibit, deconstruct, 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 requires. It builds it, forms it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis, as it is derived from Greek, means the recall of memory, for my part I hunt it down to better separate myself from it.