PARIS.- Pol Taburet’s work is embedded in the territories of the night, of domestic space, of spirituality, or even of interiority—places of intimacy which are hidden, imperceptible, or inaccessible. The artist reveals images of great power through which fears, fantasies, dreams, desires, and impulses are expressed, somewhere between the pleasure and the anger of being in the world. His work thus gives primacy to our imaginations, to the way in which they produce the experience, whether tangible or hallucinated, that we have of existence. Finally, Pol Taburet celebrates the grey areas, the territories that are more difficult to recount, more complex to describe, more delicate to share, specific to the human experience and its relationship to the invisible.

In his paintings, the gestures and obsessions for the monstrous of a Bacon or a Goya meet the magical worlds of the video game or the nightclub. Exhibited for the first time, his sculptures extend his obsession with a domestic interior haunted by a form of absurdity, which the artists Robert Gober and Dorothea Tanning explored before him.

OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell” is Pol Taburet’s first solo exhibition in an institution. Born in 1997, the artist is presenting paintings as well exploring new mediums such as sculpture and installation. The works, many of which are new, create an itinerary that unfolds from scene to scene throughout the Fondation.

Lafayette Anticipations becomes a domestic space inhabited by visions that take us into a reality close to hallucination. Drawing on both personal and collective mythologies, tales, cartoons and art history, the works presented in this exhibition are inspired by the imagination of childhood and its capacity to create new worlds.

The architecture becomes charged with presence, the inanimate comes to life, the monstrous hides in the shadows and emotions take shape. Figures emerge from paintings and sculptures like ghosts, bodies caught in the artificial lights of a living room, a theatre, a strip club. Born in a space of intimacy—a space that is domestic but also one of memory, dream or fantasy—these “spirit-figures” break free to come to bring the Fondation’s exhibition spaces to life.

Throughout the exhibition, the strange mingles with the familiar and the works invent a human bestiary. What are the innermost impulses, visions, and desires that animate our minds and our bodies? Pol Taburet’s work invites us into the depths of the being, into its invisible, shameful, or untameable territories.

OPERA III: ZOO “The Day of Heaven and Hell” is the latest chapter in a cycle dedicated to the powers of the imagination, here suspended somewhere between heaven and hell.

The exhibition unfolds over two acts around different passages between inside and outside, darkness and light, dreams and awakenings, which all evoke the times of birth and death, central themes in the work of Pol Taburet.

On the first floor, Pol Taburet fills the domestic space with a dreamlike and fantastical dimension: its inhabitants become sexualised monsters, its objects are threatening, and its bodies are captive of the spaces in which they are located.

At the threshold of this first act, Sunset II (2021) depicts the power of a cry somewhere between fear and ecstasy: that of a newborn baby as well as that of a teenager in a concert mosh pit. The visitor is then welcomed by a crowd of anthropomorphic sculptures, Soul Trains (2023), which guard the entrance.

Creatures at the intersection of myths and cartoons, their quasi-human faces are attached to a child’s cart. Their closed eyes invite us into reverie. At the centre of this floor, a room houses Belly (2023), a large fountain which symbolizes fertility and immortality in many myths.




Its rounded shape evokes the body of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality. Here, the fountain is dried up and rusty, bearing the traces and weight of a time which seems to have caught up with it.

These themes are further developed with the group of oblong sculptures Ô... Trees (2023), on which the face of a muse has been sculpted.

Their shape is reminiscent of the cypress tree, a symbol of immortality, of dildos, or the more violent shape of an artillery shell.

The characters we encounter in the gallery of paintings take us deep into their all-consuming impulses, into their love and sexual relationships, as in Götterspeise (2021), which takes the mythological figure of the mother wolf and turns it into a cannibal being, or in Mars (2021), which confronts the god of war with a monster ready to swallow him up with its gaping mouth.

On the top floor, the second act opens outwards: the natural, zenithal light evokes sacred architecture and the divine. The works move away from the intimate, focusing instead on our relationship to the world and the powers that govern it.

With My dear (2023), a dining room standing in the centre of the space, is erected like a temple to a deity, hidden under a large tablecloth, like the monster under a child’s bed. [MF1] Opposite it, Fork Melody (2023), a group of sculptures of oversized, timeworn nails, also symbolises a latent threat and a hidden violence.

This violence surfaces in A Sacred Pit (2021)a painting of a scream that recalls Sunset II, that of a face caught between metal doors that seem to be closing in on it.
The life/death pair is on show in other paintings on this floor, such as Parade (2022), where two female figures dance away from a doorway, evoking the liberating and cathartic dimension of carnival and dance.

For Our Children (2022) deals with the theme of the fall and the opposition between celestial and terrestrial forces, with its female bodies fertilizing the earth, of which only the legs elevated by stilettos are visible. Reinterpreted biblical episodes offer a narrative that opens up new mythologies, anchored in the strangeness of everyday life. The Christian figure is found in Christ’s tongue (2021), a painting of a being vomiting up a crucifix in a rejection of an entire belief system.

Pol Taburet is a French artist who graduated from the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art de Paris-Cergy. Born in 1997, he lives and works in Paris.

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 they exist together in the domestic space, and the shifts between the inanimate and the animate. A mysterious and magical power emanates from his figures and sparks our imagination. His work blends various sources of inspiration including Caribbean mythology and beliefs, the history of art, and contemporary culture including cartoons, TV series and music videos.

He presented the solo exhibitions OPERA II at C L E A R I N G Gallery, Los Angeles, in 2022 and OPERA I at the gallery Balice Hertling, Paris, in 2021.

His works are held in many collections: Boros Collection, Kadist, Longlati Fondation, Pinault Collection, Samdani Art Fondation, Sifang Art Museum, The Homestead Collection, X Museum.

June 21, 2023 - September 3, 2023