Pol Taburet, Desire and Stones (detail), 2025. Acrylics, alcohol-based paint, and oil pastel on canvas, 250 × 190 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM. Photo: Romain Darnaud.
MADRID—French-Guadeloupean artist Pol Taburet makes his Spanish debut in Oh, If Only I Could Listen, a site-specific exhibition staged inside Madrid’s historic Pabellón de los Hexágonos. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and presented by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the show merges painting, sound, drawing, and installation in a space once built for the 1958 Brussels Expo. Across these works, Taburet departs from his signature noise and intensity, opting instead for...
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MADRID—French-Guadeloupean artist Pol Taburet makes his Spanish debut in Oh, If Only I Could Listen, a site-specific exhibition staged inside Madrid’s historic Pabellón de los Hexágonos. Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and presented by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the show merges painting, sound, drawing, and installation in a space once built for the 1958 Brussels Expo. Across these works, Taburet departs from his signature noise and intensity, opting instead for silence — a hushed visual language that explores limbo, ritual, and repetition through fluid, spectral forms.
Taburet’s new paintings are rendered on a monumental scale, populated by hooded figures, double-bodied ghosts, and ambiguous beasts, all suspended in weightless space. Their colour is vibrant but contained, working against the gothic intensity of their themes: violence, mortality, and the politics of visibility. Architectural curvature and acoustic stillness guide the viewer through the Pabellón’s hexagonal layout, encouraging slow movement, even reverence. A central soundscape — made of echoing whispers and metallic clatter — prepares the visitor for what Taburet calls a “cleansing,” an invitation to see without judgment.
The works mark a conceptual evolution. Taburet employs repeated motifs — white tablecloths, pointed hats, skeletal beings — to thread narratives across media. At the show’s climax, Desire and stones stands like an altarpiece, a doubled scream frozen in paint, blending Afro-Caribbean funerary tradition with European iconography. What emerges is a world unbound by realism or logic, one that asks not to be solved, but entered. With this exhibition, Taburet confirms himself not only as a painter of myth and the body, but as an architect of immersive, psychic space.
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