by Johanna Siegler // Apr. 25, 2025
‘Because he spoke’ (2025), part of a new body of work Parisian artist Pol Taburet created for his Schinkel Pavillon solo exhibition, potently encapsulates the show’s underlying, at times elusive, system of meaning. Within a gray-washed, airless zone, two spectral figures stand doubled on the left. Their mouths open, one gags forth an elongated, gleaming skeletal arm that stretches toward a solitary figure on the right. Draped in iridescent fabric and crowned with a pitch-black, halo-like disc, the lone entity meets the gesture in mute endurance with their own arm unnaturally extended. The enigmatic tableau introduces ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre’ as an elaborate body of work infused with the antagonistic interplay of address and stillness, establishing the unresolved conditions that inform the exhibition as a whole.
Pol Taburet: ‘Because he spoke,’ 2025 // Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York, photo by Romain Darnaud
Taburet’s first solo exhibition in Germany presents a dark fable staged through both painting and sculpture. At its heart is the legend of Papa Tonnerre, a tale the artist authored to serve as the show’s inner skeleton. Grounded in inherited modes of storytelling, this narrative framework draws from Afro-Caribbean mythology and Guadeloupean oral culture, particularly stories transmitted through his mother, grandmother and aunts. The protagonist of Taburet’s tale is a mute villager, involuntarily made confidant to communal sins and secrets, who longs to shed the burden of their testimonies. In exchange for stolen relics; a bell, a trumpet, a beast-headed vial and some pepper, he regains the ability to speak. Overcome by rage at his community, he betrays their secrets, blurting out truths best left unsaid. For this transgression, he is exiled and forced to speak endlessly into the void, caught in a loop of testimony that can no longer be received by anyone. Analogous to this grim parable of speech and its discontents, Taburet’s work offers no neat resolution or symbolic closure to comfort the viewer. As a perplexing leitmotif, the collapse of communication permeates every corner of the exhibition, which unfolds as a series of processional scenes.
Pol Taburet: ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre,’ 2025, installation view at Schinkel Pavillon // Photo by Frank Sperling
Formally, Taburet translates this narrative into a distinctive visual language that is at once figurative and of phantasmagoric inarticulateness. Conjuring lineages of Afro-diasporic and Latin American popular art and surrealist imagery at once, his paintings fuse techniques of airbrushed gradient and precise brushwork to conjure ambiguous, in-between spaces populated by hybrid bodies. Their scarcely human faces often appear as blurred, ghoulish masks, twisted and misshapen or partially obscured by costumes and props. Tall pointed hoods recur as a menacing motif, lending the figures an air of arcane ceremony. Such elements draw on a broad iconographic archive, from voodoo lore to Catholic pageantry, without settling into a single referent. The paintings’ backgrounds are equally equivocal, flattening into vacuities with empty corners or shallow stage-like settings that offer little anchoring context. Throughout his newest works, Taburet has largely abandoned the fluorescent exuberance of his previous work for a quieter visual register of deep nocturnal blues, oxblood reds and sooty blacks. His application of light is dim, often focused on a ghostly white detail (a tablecloth, hybrid grimaces between outcry and grin) that flashes in the gloom. This dramatic chiaroscuro, without depicting explicit violence, heightens a sense of dread and stains the atmosphere with implied atrocity.
Pol Taburet: ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre,’ 2025, installation view at Schinkel Pavillon // Photo by Frank Sperling
Taburet’s work resonates with what Gilles Deleuze once remarked on the paintings of Francis Bacon. In his discussion of the Irish painter, the philosopher described a figurational modus in which “the visible movements of the figures are subordinated to the invisible forces exerted upon them.” Similarly, Taburet engages a very specific apprehension of what might be addressed as the painterly operation of “force” in these affectual terms. It is as if a twisted Pinocchian logic agitates the field, although this time, it is not a lie that extends his figures outward, but truths so heavy they torment and distort from within. In the cosmos of ‘Papa Tonnerre,’ the unsaid and the unseen carry an enduring weight that bears down on every painted body and object. While the paintings and a series of 12 lithographs in an adjoining chamber, presumably guarding nightmarish visions of the villagers’ secrets (‘Papa tonnerre’s tales,’ 2025), suggest narrative scenes, Taburet’s installations transpose the narrative into participatory space.
Pol Taburet: ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre,’ 2025, installation view at Schinkel Pavillon // Photo by Frank Sperling
The ground floor of the two-story pavilion, a windowless octagonal room, is turned into an eerie village commons. Within the felt-lined walls made to swallow even the most faint of noises, six large-scale bronze heads, each mounted on a black plinth, are arranged in a loose semicircle. Features partially obliterated and surfaces rugged with marks, they stand as if in furtive dialogue. One bears a miniature skull on its head, like a parasite or a mnemonic weight. Despite their gathering, the figures’ mouths are sealed as they appear to commune in silence.
Upstairs, in the glass-walled rotunda, Taburet’s sculptural ensemble stages a somber courtroom vignette. A heavy wooden screen evoking both ecclesiastical furniture and bureaucratic partitioning buttresses two bestial sculptures. They face a hunched, monolithic head with hollowed eyes and an elongated, beak-like protrusion lying embedded atop a blocky pedestal, establishing a tribunal scene. The pair of bronze birds that forms Taburet’s ‘The nest’ (2025), uncanny amalgams of avian and human traits, point accusatory beaks or wings toward the center, as if indicting whoever enters their gaze. Visitors who step into this upper chamber find themselves implicitly on trial, caught between these silent judges. The effect is distinctly theatrical: one feels like an unwelcome guest wandering through an elaborate ritual of indictment and penance. Crucially, the artist blocks any catharsis. The sculptures remain implacably mute, never gesturing towards a verdict.
Pol Taburet: ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre,’ 2025, installation view at Schinkel Pavillon // Photo by Frank Sperling
Despite the narrative framework for the show, Taburet pointedly refuses to deliver a neat story or resolution. Contrastingly, the scenic episodes unfold as a cycle of bad dreams, in which the visitors are implicated as unenlightened witnesses, trespassing scenarios where they cannot intervene and can barely decipher what is at stake. This enforced distance is key to the work’s critical register. In a subtle way, ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre’ addresses the politics of who gets to speak and who must, in return, remain silent. The mute Papa Tonnerre carries the collective burden of his community’s suppressed desires and vices, a burden that suggests the weight of cultural trauma or marginalized knowledge borne by subaltern figures. When he finally breaks the seal of silence, he is cast out, exiled not merely for the content of his speech but for the act of speaking itself. The dynamic echoes a contemporary ethos of systemic repression, in which the articulation of uncomfortable truths incurs structural exclusion. Yet Taburet resists any didactic closure; rather than staging this mechanism as a narrative climax, he inscribes it into the material and affective strata of the work. The show’s lack of moral catharsis compels us to confront the discomfort of witnessing at once. In the end, meaning remains fugitive yet palpable, as if it were muttered in a dead language.
Exhibition Info
Schinkel Pavillon
Pol Taburet: ‘The Burden of Papa Tonnerre’
Exhibition: Mar. 29-July 13, 2025
schinkelpavillon.de
Oberwallstraße 32, 10117 Berlin, click here for map
