2023-08-08 11:14:33
In an incandescent yellow room, five strange toys lie abandoned on the carpet. Five carts each carved with a black face, with closed eyes, as if asleep or in a trance. Welcome to “The Day of Heaven and Hell”, Pol Taburet’s exhibition at the Lafayette Anticipations foundation in Paris.
A quick success
This rising star of French contemporary art conceived this hanging as the third in his “Opera” started in 2020. At the time, this young man of Guadeloupe origin was still a student at the National School of Arts in Paris-Cergy, when the Balice Hertling gallery offered him his first exhibition in the capital, which he then baptized “Opera I”. Presented the following year at the Basel Fair, his nocturnal paintings, haunted by black figures with phosphorescent eyes painted with airbrush, met with rapid success, with the collector François Pinault and the Clearing Gallery which exhibited “Opera II”. in Los Angeles. In 2022, Pol Taburet wins, at 25, the prize Reiffers Art Initiatives for young creation and cultural diversity.
At the Lafayette Foundation, the artist imagined a domestic space, where “the spectator would feel like the intruder immersed in the interiority of another”. A place of exploration of dreams and fantasies therefore, in which he confides having slipped a part of his family history, marked by the power of women and a psychoanalyst father.
View of the Pol Taburet “Opera III” exhibition at the Lafayette Anticipations foundation in Paris. / Pierre ANTOINE / Lafayette Anticipations
silent cries
Along the way, we find his paintings in which the dark characters stand out in front of brightly colored doors and windows, like mysterious passages between two worlds. Matching these decors, rooms in golden yellow, royal blue or green also serve as showcases for the artist’s new sculptures. Monstrous beings appear: a table with lion’s paws, a forest populated by spirits, two dogs with human heads mating or even soucougnans, these Creole vampires resembling a black bird or a ball of fire. In the electric lights of a nightclub, strippers, their faces covered with leather masks, come across specters of quimbois, Guadeloupe voodoo, but also a crucified body reminiscent of the paintings of Francis Bacon. Elsewhere, it is rather Goya’s nightmares that one thinks of or the sculptor Brancusi and his bird in spacetransformed by Pol Taburet into a face stretched like a threatening knife.
Because the revolt rumbles in silence. Here, a black man lies in the mud with a bullet in his heart. Mouths, crowned with gold teeth like those of certain rappers, open on a silent cry. Dancing fists go up. Giant rusty nails locked in a small room evoke barricades or revolutionary pikes. In one painting, Mars, the god of war, appears to be preparing for battle. Behind personal mythology, politics emerges discreetly, like a flag in Caribbean colors.
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