Occult Forces Will Be Your Savior / Pol Taburet

Exhibition of the Frence-based and Guadeloupe-originated artist at Schinkel Pavillon

A reverential fear accompanied one’s entry into the Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin. It was hard not to succumb to the dread provoked by those judging authorities, figures that rose from canvases and sculptures, whose silence carried the weight of condemnation even before the judged could speak. On view until recently, The Burden of Papa Tonnerre by Pol Taburet tightened the throat with a knot of dread, generating a muteness that rendered visitors defenceless before the demonic forces that confronted them. Judges, supporters. His silent lament carried the full corporeal weight of human existence, a mute cry that summoned the darkest powers.

Judgement Is Damnation Masked in Candor
A place detached from time, freed from physical law: within the octagon of the Schinkel Pavillon, the anticipation of judgment becomes a form of eternal damnation. Before a towering wooden structure—at once confessional, domestic cabinet, and judicial throne—an inescapable Kafkaesque anguish takes hold. Two enigmatic beings, bodiless and spectral, reduced to head and spirit, perch on opposite sides of this architectural monolith. Their long beaks and wings might suggest birds—perhaps doves, if one considers the pallor that defines them—but their faces are chimeric. Neither fully human nor animal, they are carved deep in the bone, eyeless, nostrils hollow, cheekbones jutting forward—reminiscent of the plague masks once worn during ancient pandemics. They do not speak, yet their presence exudes death. As if descended from another realm, they confer in a silence heavy with ominous authority.

The Finitude in Front of Her Majesty the Darkness
Between them lies an object: part sarcophagus, part coffin, part sphinx, part gravestone. It contains all these references, yet resists them. Cast in bronze like the creatures themselves, it shares their material but not their lustre. Where they gleam with an eerie whiteness, this form is dark, dulled, imperfect—sufficiently so to evoke mortality, holding its weight deep in its warped surface. Like a courtroom suspended in limbo, it seems to absorb all human dread, a receptacle of fear in the face of those immaculate entities that defy classification. Acrylic paintings featuring symbols of power encircle the bronze form and haunt the space: anonymous figures rendered in a fugitive balance between clarity and dissolution. Their faces blur, their limbs fade into mist. Adorned with arcane headgear and occult insignia, they radiate an energy that rustles through the viewer’s senses, unsettling and omnipresent. Inside this suffocating octagon—escape seemingly impossible, as if already imprisoned—a crowd of deathly busts delivers its silent sentence. No eyes, no mouths, no ears. No human anatomy. Yet they judge. They observe. They condemn. Majestic and implacable, they stand on equal ground with the winged sentinels above, who survey the space with unrelenting occult force.

Exhibiting the Still Staging of a Hellish Fable
The exhibition The Burden of Papa Tonnere at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin with multimedia works by Pol Taburet begins here, in this theatre of condemnation. Papa Tonnerre—named for thunder—not because he produces sound, but because all that escapes him is a reflection of a higher, invisible force: the lightning. He is silent, absent. We are Papa Tonnerre, guided by invisible forces that control our voices and punish us when we reveal their sins. The work draws on a fable written by Taburet and it recounts Papa Tonnerre’s mute existence and his entanglement with occult spirits. He is warned of the day his voice will be returned—only to be cursed by those who entrusted him with their secrets. Doomed to be judged. Condemned to a silence so absolute, it drowns even memory. How much knowledge of the world can one endure? And what becomes of those who carry the knowledge of others’ guilt? Papa Tonnerre is born mute, burdened with secrets that are not his own, a vessel of unspoken grief.

Collaging Art History, Painting Flaming Dreams
Taburet’s world is a fever dream of references—Caribbean heritage, voodoo syncretism, classical painting, and contemporary anxiety, manifested by his continuous dialogue with the work of Francis Bacon. “I want to use this history because it’s an open door to collage and recomposition, and because it’s preexisting” states the artist himself, unveiling its attitude to mashup and blur timelines with his own heritage. Born in 1997, his rise has been rapid, anchored in a singular painterly style that fuses airbrush and oil stick with traditional acrylic. A dual technique that mirrors the very themes of his work—flesh and spirit, death and rebirth, the seen and the buried. The result is a violent interplay of surfaces that flourish in rusty tones, evanescent almost decaying lines and uncanny characters. His figures, often monstrous fusions of man and beast, float in hostile, abstract voids. They speak of life and death and the uncertain threshold in between. His paintings hum with a spiritual charge whose praise for the darker forces is impossible to ignore yet hard to grasp if not leaving behind all preconceived certainties.

Evoking the Obscurity to reach the Eternal Solace of the Voice
Taburet does not create to explain: he creates to summon. And through these rooms, the deafened scream of Papa Tonnerre still echoes. Silenced, yet howling. A lament spat from a mouth that does not move, for the curse that shaped him, for the silence that strangles, for the weight of darkness pressing upon him. The staging of the show obliterates time and sound—walls wrapped in felt, windows shuttered, voices absorbed. Until at last he surrenders, crossing into that immaterial abyss of sombreness. No longer judged, but judging sat next to the forces that he got to know in that suspended space.

Occult Forces Will Be Your Savior / Pol Taburet

Credits:

Artist: Pol Taburet / @yves_ciroc
Exhibition at: Schinkel Pavillon / @schinkelpavillon
Words: Giulia Piceni / @giuliaapiceni
Editor: Maria Abramenko  / @mariabramenko
Junior Editor: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci

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