Sylvain Fraysse

Whether expressed through drawing, installation or engraving, Sylvain Fraysse’s work is underpinned by a reflection on the notion of time: time in its duration, as experienced through the repetitive, meticulous and almost tedious practice of engraving; and the immediate frenzied temporality of the media images from which he draws inspiration (the internet, the press, film and social media).
His almost labour-like production of images — which he creates first by observing and drawing, then by repeating the acts of carving, scratching and rubbing — stands in opposition, by the very process of its creation, to the fluidity (and disembodiment) of contemporary images. As critic Mary Baldo writes, “This struggle against matter is in and of itself a way of being in the world — if not pessimistic, then surely furious.”
This take on the world and on contemporaneity draws largely from vernacular culture and the media, filtered through the prism of the aesthetics of indie rock, skateboarding, adolescence and motifs of death, rituals, the sacred, eroticism, and even pornography.
In this universe that he zaps or scrolls through, Sylvain Fraysse works with processes of extraction or freeze-framing. This forced suspension urges us to pay attention to what lurks behind these images, what lies dormant within them, their recurrences, but also — and above all — the fact that they are destined to dissolve and disappear into media traffic.

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024