Living objects | Exhibition Pol Taburet
Pol Taburet is a French artist who graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Paris-Cergy.
In his paintings as well as in his sculptures, Pol Taburet questions the relationship between the body - human and animal - and the object: the way in which together they exist in the domestic space, and the shifts between the inanimate and the animate. The figures he stages emanate a mysterious and magical power that summons our imagination.
His work blends various sources of inspiration including Caribbean mythology and beliefs, contemporary culture and European painting.
In 2022, he was awarded the Reiffers Art Initiative prize for young creation and cultural diversity.
He presented the solo exhibitions OPERA III : ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris en 2023; OPERA II at C L E A R I N G, Los Angeles, in 2022 and OPERA I at the gallery Balice Hertling Paris in 2021.
Transcript
It comes from a lot of things. It comes from my parents' flat, where there are lots and lots of objects and I think that's something I lived with when I was young. At home there were also these objects that had this sort of almost animal shape. When I was little, when I looked at a table, this table with slightly rounded legs, I had the impression that I was looking at some kind of animal: a kind of surface and 4 legs. I was smaller, so things seemed bigger, the house seemed different... It's something that really affected me, because in my paintings you often find this relationship between the object and the body.
It's that fear we have when we're little, that fear of the dark where all our fears and fantasms come to life. We have such a power of imagination that we can frighten ourselves and I wanted to trigger that in the exhibition too, I wanted us to be in my head, even if when I do it, it almost makes me smile because there's a rather ridiculous side to these shapes sometimes: the forest of heads, for example, which look like cypress trees and are also a reference to Brancusi and Paul McCarthy; these kinds of sculptures that echo a lot of things, it's also to muddy the waters a bit and to prevent the viewer from getting stuck on one idea and always having ten thousand different readings when looking at the sculptures, so that everyone leaves with their own story of the exhibition. I take great pleasure in creating these distressing and grotesque scenes, a kind of black humour.
The nails, the table and the trains, for example, are all things that come from home. The trains, for example, are a toy that my mother has: a wooden crocodile with a slice of wood and a wire that you pull and it starts to snake in a certain way. The table is a remake of the one at my parents' house, and the sphynx is because I have a sphynx.
The exhibition is almost like my family, because there are five train heads and there are five of us in the family, there are five cypress trees, there's the table and the sphynx. And then there are the nails, which for me are the only really enclosed piece in the exhibition. I see them as a family secret, which would be each person's trauma, their inner trauma or their fears, it's what we hide, it's perhaps the storage room in a house, it's your mess, and that's important too, it's a balance, you need to have a mess, you need to have chaos within you otherwise it's neutral.
There's also a religious spirit that's very much inspired by my grandmother's side of the family: with this room that's almost a kind of temple for the sphinx. There's this epic ascent towards the forms, and when you start there's the fountain: then it's quite majestic, it has a very round and protective side but at the same time there's this spike that pierces this vision and makes it almost hard - not that my mother is a hard woman - but there's this side to Caribbean culture, which is a very matriarchal culture: there's this gentleness and this strength. And I think my father is a little bit everywhere in the exhibition, but I think that's on the more psychological side: he's a psychoanalyst. I think there's a side where he's guided the exhibition quite a bit. He is somewhat involved in the direction of the paintings and sculptures.
It's a tribute to a lot of people around me.