sylvain barberot - Skull #2

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

Here and in these works, time is frozen through the use of the skull as a timeless, unchanging, and fixed support. Temporalities confront each other, and the darkness of the idea we have of death bends under the brilliance of the gold leaf, reflecting the light with its shine.
A work of art is inherently a vanity. It reflects the artist's desire to objectify themselves in order to survive time and responds to the vanity of the artist as a demiurge. Memory is not fixed; it remains to come, never anchoring itself in infinity. Its disappearance is its only recourse.


International artist whose work is based on the dichotomy that exists between memory and forgetting. In my view, memory is the essential element that links our body to the world. However, while our culture strives to engrain history with a chisel, I endeavor to inhibit, deconstruct, or even erase my own memory. The exercise of forgetting is a vast undertaking... The body is merely the support of this memory, upon which it depends or even requires. It constructs, models, and transforms it. And while 'anamnèse' translates from Greek as the retrieval of memory, I personally pursue it to better detach myself from it.