The power of music and film | 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
I was thinking about it earlier, it had a very particular influence on OPERA II, which was a series that was more inspired by American culture, in an almost direct way.
It was particularly when I was listening to trap music, lots and lots of trap music, at home, when I was painting, and after a while it had too much influence on the rhythm, on the way you painted, and now it's much more... quite a lot of jazz that influenced that series and music that's a bit more spatial, more experimental too, and I think you can maybe feel that in the paintings in the way they're more airy, and less tense like trap music used to be.
And now it's something more ethereal - also because the studio has changed a lot, it gives me more space, I breathe a lot more.
I don't really have a particular film style, but I like dramas, thrillers, suspense and horror films - when they're good. I don't think I paint horror. My latest series is actually quite intimate, with characters who are in a relationship, having a good time, having a party. Back then, I used to watch a lot of films and take screenshots just to get an idea of the framing, because that's what cinema is all about, it's a kind of living painting.
This time, the fact that I've moved away from that a bit, or at least that I'm less inspired by it, means that the paintings are closer to what I feel - I imagine - in my everyday life, in my relationships with others. I see these paintings more as a kind of poem, almost, poems that don't really have any... they're just poems of observation.
It's a rather romantic series in the end, I think, romanticism in painting: without that epic side, more something natural, also more humble in the colours, there's less of a desire to make the viewer strike and confront something hard. There are fewer spikes too, I've noticed that in paintings now we're starting to get into the round, we're getting closer to human beings: the spike becomes a round spike, there it could have been spikes and it becomes a kind of clown hat.