Pol Taburet’s dark-romantic carnival

Pol Taburet’s work is an anarchic theatre. Drawing on scenes of subversion and occult symbolism, his visions haunt and delight. This is as true in his new photography series, created with Dexter Navy and reproduced in these pages, as it is in other forms of his multidisciplinary practice, which includes painting, sculpture, film and installation. The present series depicts a horned mask, a variation on the theme of the corneous beasts in his spectral paintings, which is worn and performed in various subcultural contexts. Taburet christened the mask ‘PYT’, his initials, as a kind of perverse alter-ego or a doppelgänger, which, in fiction and mythology, is often portrayed as a ghostly or paranormal phenomenon and as a harbinger of bad luck. The mask both is and is not an extension of the artist’s dramatic persona. Part of a durational project, or “an exaggerated journey that captures the full spectrum of life,” PYT enables Taburet to experiment with the possibilities of a parallel life. Originally conceived as a ballerina or an opera singer, and therefore an embodiment of high cultural talent immersed in the belly of performative sex and arbitrary violence, we see PYT in various environments of innocence and experience. Whatever the circumstances, he remains static and ageless in a transient world.

PYT appears as a dungaree doll and plaything on the shoulders of a young child, as a young adult immersed in hedonistic debauchery, and as the gentle mourner at his beloved’s graveside. PYT contains multitudes. In each scenario, PYT is envisioned “as a storyteller or an actor,” Taburet says, “and while in a painting it feels violent, here he is more like a cartoon character who keeps repeating himself in different scenarios, which is an easier way for me to narrate.” A liminal character whose idiosyncratic facial features – part monster, part human; threatening yet vulnerable – PYT radiates a sense of menace. In the collage sequence, hands reach out across the void but seem destined never to make contact, as though the triumvirate of PYT masks stand guard to ensure every interaction, every touch, and every kiss, must be held in abeyance. He is an orchestrator of intimacy who immediately forecloses it, like Cupid locked in a nightmare.

The horn is a motif found in several of Taburet’s installations and sculptures, including the wood and bronze Soul Trains (2023), which protrudes from the chin and thus variously implies either “the dominance of the billy goat, the fantastical singularity of the unicorn,” or else as standing as an aberrant anomaly. “The point is a shape that comes into play as a violent, bestial, threatening motif,” Taburet says, “the horn itself instantly provokes a dynamic of penetration.” Inspired by Yoruba Orisha spirituality, or the experience of being possessed by a deity, as well as the syncretic belief systems of Afro-Creole Quimbois, the mask transforms those who wear it variously into a god or a brute. In one image, a friend of the artist wears the mask, and thus becomes PYT; in a sleazy underground strip club, the swirling, orgiastic frenzy of pole dancers and writhing bodies render the mask limp to pleasure. Elsewhere, the image of a taxidermied white dove in mid-flight, flanked by a beautiful woman in a body bag and seemingly reflected into a magenta mirror, does not feature PYT at all – but this scene is, no doubt, his dwelling place. This Surrealist montage of animals, bodies, and impossible physics recalls the experiments of Man Ray and Salvador Dalí – Taburet is their child.

For Taburet, the Japanese hannya mask and Malian Dogon masquerades are precedents of the ways masks enable you, in his words, “to change your shape, and to play with your body,” while recognising that, “of course, the masks used at the carnival are also all about power.” Echoing the dark spirituality and dualism in the title of ‘The Day of Heaven and Hell’, Taburet’s 2023 exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, the PYT photo series plays on the carnivalesque, a medieval idea that dominant social relations are subverted for a single day by humour and chaos. In this eccentric but, crucially, short-lived moment full of blasphemy, obscenity and debasement, there is the dissolution of conventional hierarchies: the sacred becomes profane, the low becomes high, the stupid replaces the clever, as all the latent sides of human nature reveal and express themselves. Taburet calls these scenarios his “Dark-Romantic Carnival.”

Taburet’s reimagining of the mask is therefore a “marginal gesture,” he says, which is also in conversation with several of his modernist heroes, such as Constantin Brâncusi, whose work, in turn, referenced the Senufo déguélé helmet masks used in ritual ceremonies. Brâncusi is a consistent source of inspiration for Taburet, and the young artist’s Ôtrees (2023) resemble the Romanian master’s elongated sculptures that coalesce human facial features with cypress trees. “One of the reasons why cypress trees grow in cemeteries is because they survive well in soil that contains corpses,” Taburet reflects, “it’s a tree that refers to eternity, death, and reincarnation.” These themes animate PYT’s most sensitive image, the one at the graveside, whereby we encounter both life and death in the same picture. Above ground, PYT crosses his hands in reverence and looks down upon a small bed of flowers above his beloved’s casket; below ground, adorned in black and lying in a shallow grave, she holds a flower which stretches impossibly out into the world above. Yellow sprouts from spring rain. An indifferent blue sky pushes everything to the surface. Everything is lost and yet held safe. “My work negotiates between the violent and the tender worlds, between the world of life and death,” Taburet writes. The savage beauty of these works is that you can never really tell what is violent and what is tender, what is alive and what is dead. We are mere spectators in PYT’s carnival, after all.