Sylvain BARBEROT - Skull#1

A mould of a human skull made in epoxy resin and coated with a soft white elastomer, its eyes filled with a natural leaf gilded with 24-carat gold leaf. The skull is mounted to a metal piece that allows it to be fixed to the wall.

Here and in these works, if time is frozen by using the skull as an eternal, immutable, and fixed support, the skin that covers it, by contrast, seems to flow without ceasing. Temporalities confront one another and the darkness of the idea we have of death folds under the brightness of this material, which approaches ceramic. This material reflects light just as these fine-gold sheets of gold leaf that carry the object beyond time.

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

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. However, while our culture strives to engrave history with a chisel, I strive to inhibit, deconstruct, or even erase my own memory. A vast undertaking, the exercise of forgetting… The body is only the support of this memory of which it is dependent, indeed needy. It constructs it, models it, and transforms it. And if anamnesis is, from Greek, the ascent/recall of memory, for my part I hunt it to better separate myself from it.