Desire, vice and violence: Pol Taburet in Madrid

When I meet Pol Taburet on a grey afternoon in Madrid, he has already completed multiple interviews and photoshoots with no break. Not that you’d notice – the young Parisian artist is positively charmant as he shakes my hand – and afterall, being pulled in multiple directions must feel familiar by now for a talent who has risen to Wunderkind status so spectacularly in recent years, with shows in Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Paris and Los Angeles.

We are at Taburet’s latest exhibition, ‘Oh, If Only I Could Listen’, at the newly refurbished Pabellón de los Hexágonos, on the edge of Casa de Campo park. This masterpiece in modernist modular design, originally built for the 1958 Brussels Universal Exposition where it won the gold medal, has now been painstakingly restored as a multi-purpose cultural venue.

In the main space, ten of Taburet’s new paintings are hung from steel columns. The room’s long, high, nave-like proportions, floor to ceiling windows and hexagonal alcoves lend an ecclesiastical vibe. Once the interview begins, the congregation has almost entirely disappeared, and the hubbub of voices gives way to an eerie soundscape created by the artist for the exhibition. The wailing, droning, discordant composition, full of warped synths and manic chimes, is a perfect accompaniment to the dark, moody paintings that fill the space.

“It’s quite a break from my old work,” admits Taburet, who has completed all works in the show since the start of this year. “I really wanted to have unseductive paintings that are less charming.” Gone is the riotous carnival of Caribbean colours for which the artist is best known, In its place are dark and muted earthy tones of aegean blue, oxblood and black.

The earliest signs of this shift can be traced to Taburet’s group show at Galerie Neu in Berlin last Autumn, but the 28-year-old’s first visit to Madrid and face-to-face experience with Goya’s late-career Black Paintings deepened this development. As it happens, I arrive at the interview straight from my own first encounter with Goya’s enigmatic works at the Museo del Prado, and I’m eager to swap notes.

“There was this weird sensation I had when I saw them,” says Taburet. “It’s a kind of dark fantastic – you feel that humans are the victims of all this sacral violence because it looks like it’s coming from all around. It’s like some god has come to earth to fight and destroy everything. There is something unfair, the humans are like victims of the gods, there is something very apocalyptic inside that.”

Though the genesis of Goya’s Black Paintings remains contested, with some claiming them as works of satire and others a consequence of the horrors of war, they are unquestionably confronting and visceral. What lingered in my mind long after leaving the room where they are displayed (which, in shape and proportion, is equally reminiscent of a chapel) are the faces: ghoulish, twisted, misshapen, scarcely human, the kind of thing you might see on a bad acid trip, their nightmarish qualities are invoked here in Taburet’s latest paintings.

In The ones that hide for example, two Siamese figures appear, one holding a skull. Though their faces are partially concealed by a conjoined hat, the sort that might be donned by a Medieval plague doctor, their spiked noses and glinting smiles emit a gleeful and palpable threat.

In Very white teeth, waxed tongue, meanwhile, three identical black-suited figures sit behind a pristine white table cloth, their faces, turned to one side as if observing something beyond the edge of the canvas, are reduced to fleshy, airbrushed blurs set with gleaming maniacal grins. On the table in front of them lies the mummified form of a body, with a smaller adjacent table carrying what appears to be its head.

Each figure wears a tall, pointed hat, a recurring motif for Taburet that most obviously alludes to the Ku Klux Klan, but to a Spanish audience, perhaps most closely resembles the capirotes worn during the Holy Week procession in Seville (a scene harrowingly depicted by Goya in his early 19th-century painting, A Procession of Flagellants). “It’s also something ritualistic,” says Taburet. “It could be a ceremony, but a weird type of ceremony, like a cannibalistic thing.”

In the fading light of the exhibition space, Taburet’s white tablecloths, which feature in all but three paintings, punch through the gloaming like apparitions. “When my family has a big dinner, we use a white tablecloth because we want it to look perfect – but actually it’s full of stains at the end,” he says. “Ghosts are also part of it, because of [the likeness] to the costume, but also the absence of something – the emptiness makes something exist.” Simultaneously mechanisms of revelation and “cache-misère” (hidden misery), they heighten the surreal, dream-like drama that surrounds them, reinforcing a sense of ritual and a fear of what’s hidden.

Taburet never plans his paintings but in his accompanying pencil drawings their genealogies are easily discerned. If anything, the prevailing sense of threat is more overt in these psychosexual sketches: the torso of a woman with a twin barrel of a gun instead of a mouth, or a figure in a Scream mask receiving a blowjob, an adjacent shadow revealing a scimitar, curved upward and erect, instead of a penis. “Even in previous work I tried to embrace violence or horror,” says Taburet. “It’s part of the DNA of my work; desires, vices, it’s something that inspires me a lot to paint people.”

Given this inclination, it’s perhaps no surprise that Taburet and Goya should make natural bedfellows. Like the condemned souls in Goya’s Black Paintings, on the verge of starvation or death, Taburet is equally drawn to people “on the edge”. But whereas Goya embraces fully-fledged chaos, Taburet’s vision is bound by a certain insidious tension, a shadowy, masked malevolence that incites our darkest thoughts and threatens to erupt without warning.