“I want the work to be legible through a child’s eyes, for them to see something joyful and fun inside of it, and for adults to have a much more intense understanding of what’s being presented.”
Perverting the sense of calm typically expected of domestic spaces, Pol Taburet’s Buried on a Sunday from 2021 lures its viewer deeper still into its carnivalesque realm, an arena rich with the iconographical references that have catalyzed the artist’s ascent as one of contemporary art’s most exciting voices. Exhibited prominently at OPERA II at C L E A R I N G, Beverly Hills — an exhibition which preceded OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell” at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris, the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition — the present work boasts a canvas teeming with spectacular textural and tonal modulations, from the paradoxical bulk of fluorescent green to spectral, aerated diffusions of blacks and whites, all of which lend the work the distinctly acidic, animated quality that characterizes Taburet’s singular vision. Beings taunt us with intrepid gazes, armed with fangs, weaponous tongues, skin like latex, and pupils like lasers, simulating the retinal red eye in a flash photograph. Together they form a cast of mercurial, mutant figures which speak to the influence of ancient Afro-Caribbean mythologies and Guadeloupean oral histories on the artist’s practice. Within the confines of the shallow interior in which Buried on a Sunday takes place, the work ushers us through states of consciousness, leaving no choice but to submit to the otherworldly. With works hotly sought out by prominent collects ors, such as François Pinault, Taburet is among the most dynamic painters of his generation and is represented by Mendes Wood DM.
Taburet’s haunting tableaus rely on the full range of his compositional devices to impress a dystopian sense of terror. Blocked out in blinding neons, Buried on a Sunday’s sulphuric palette warns of poison, a villainous take on the evocative properties of color explored by the Color Field painters. Working with diverse media in each canvas, from oil, acrylic, alcohol-based pigment, airbrush, to pastel, the tactile, variegated surface makes its contents even more palpably alive — and intimidating. In fact, each technique resonates with the artist for their associations to his predecessors, whether the turpentine-doused markings of Peter Doig or the brunaille underpainting of the Old Masters. Like the other works shown in OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell,” Taburet stages the scene in a domestic interior: “I use the home as a tool,” he explained, “Everyone has an idea of what home looks like. I wanted to use this extremely common form, a place associated with protection and security, and inject it with a sort of interior nightmare.” (the artist quoted in: Ella Martin-Gachot, “With His First Institutional Solo, Pol Taburet Welcomes You Into His Mind’s Amusement Park,” Cultured Magazine, 23 June 2023 (online))
Here, shadowy corners are blasted with acidic light and populated by uncanny, humanoid creatures, all the while invoking a far-reaching dialogue that spans the Italian Renaissance to the present. The title alone alludes to a negotiation with religion, posing chaos on the day of rest: indeed, the couple visible through the doorway mimic Adam and Eve’s contrappostoed stance. The artist has particularly cited Francis Bacon as an important influence, whose obliteration of the body, whether of historic figures, his loved ones, or his own, has encouraged Taburet to tease a kind of monstrosity in his figuration only to reveal that they are only conduits for the broader world he conjures. As such, Taburet engages cleverly with the methodologies of the art historical discipline, having described his paintings as windows or television episodes; his work thrusts the long hallowed portal-picture plane into the present, but instead transforms the contents of his canvases into screens in which our own awe and fear is played back to us.
“At which point can you consider an object alive or not? An object has a life. At some point it is created, at some point it is destroyed, just like us. In voodoo you have a relation between plants and objects and the universe — what is not visible but still has an effect on us.”
Taburet’s corpus offers a chance encounter with the occult, one felt far before it can be understood. “It's true that in my paintings there's something about not saying too much,” the artist reflected, “and showing not telling. There's an element of wanting to seduce the viewer, flirting with them. I insert tons of little references in my work; I see my paintings as little poems that tell stories. Not wanting to intellectualize my work creates an expressiveness ... I didn't think my work would be so quickly received and embraced in such a public way, from my very first show. I didn't have t.mes to compose a precise vision of what version of my work, and myself, I wanted to show. I was also very quickly visually exposed with magazine covers and features. So I try to give as little away as possible in my work, because I want to show for a long t.mes .” (the artist quoted in: Ella Martin-Gachot, “With His First Institutional Solo, Pol Taburet Welcomes You Into His Mind’s Amusement Park,” Cultured Magazine, 23 June 2023 (online)) In Buried on a Sunday, Taburet continues to surprise us and sullies our boundaries between dream and reality, transforming the field of figurative painting in the process.
