Pol Taburet: The Hat And The Hunt

Cahiers d’Art is pleased to present the exhibition The Hat And The Hunt of Pol Taburet from October 18^th through December 20^th 2025, across both our galleries at 14 and 15 rue du Dragon, Paris. 

The flayed figures of El Greco, Zurbarán’s monks who “glide in silence over the flagstones of the dead,” Goya’s nightmares – they follow one after another in the Prado’s corridors. Goya, especially the older Goya, with an eye forever terrified because it has seen too many horrors; Goya, “a master in the use of grays, silvers, and pinks of the finest English painting, [trained] to paint with his knees and his fists in the dreadful tar blacks.” They have placed him all the way in the back of the museum, in a room where the pinturas negras silence all pride and remind us how deeply a certain Spain thinks and lives in black. Just a few streets away, people greet each other and drink the night away in a bar called Dolores – “sorrow” – and further still, from another room with drawn curtains and a half-open door, escapes the flamenco cry of a cantaor who breaks the silence that was made for him.

It is in that Spain, a “country open to death,” where the Reaper is cheered when leaning out a window and carried on one’s back when the figure grows tired, that Pol Taburet tried his hand at lithography. He did it in the air thick with legends and ghosts of Madrid, under the gaze of the master-spirit Goya (for that is what he must be called) and with intentions that pay him tribute: first and foremost, manhunt – nothing less than a “biblical tradition” and one of the ways the world is administered, especially when it needs to be contained.

A reality like that could not have escaped Elias Canetti, who dared to ask, “who would murder whom, if it could remain absolutely and eternally secret?” That is the whole question, and it indeed deserved to be posed through a few stones – the very ones that give form to Pol Taburet’s Papa Tonnerre’s Tales. These engravings take the name of a character who, after silently gathering the direst confessions of his confidants and revealing them, finds himself condemned to exile and to ramble on endlessly into the void. And once everything that should have stayed sealed within the silence of a promise is released, a dance of shadows begins, giving free rein to every vice and the possibility of killing or dying without a second thought.

In an uncertain, purgatorial atmosphere of a conspiracy perhaps – of mistrust, in any case – these twelve engravings depict twelve scenes that speak of the war of all against all. They recount a hunt where each is prey to another, under the powerless and idle eye of a God who watches his children tear each other apart. In the end, it hardly matters whether a sun continues to shine, whether a horizon still insists on rising to claim its light, for the beyond seems to have lost contact with the here-below. Far from wishing to naïvely brush against grace, these engravings rise out of streets and alleyways where warring shadows slip by, caring little to know whether they should join the army or the militia, because after all, anyone is a potential traitor. They head toward the abyss, they dig, they burrow. They make sense because a continuum finally imposes itself between gesture and thought, between technique and content, and because engraving has its reasons that the brushstroke ignores.

Lithography invokes emptiness and accident; it consents to surrender only accompanied by whims of which it had warned no one. It demands that one mourn every clear intention, for in trying to show one hides, and in trying to hide one exposes: that is where the “X-ray” of drawing appears, as Pol calls it – its skeleton. The line bleeds, stains emerge, and all the darkness of “sorrowful Spain” seems stubbornly to rise from beneath.

It is true that here, the sordid does not conceal itself. In the time of the Inquisition, the executioner’s house was painted red, “for he had to mark his lair and his person for the horror of his fellow men,” and thus horror was permitted to parade proudly in the form of the black, horned heads of the inquisitors.

And yet, how wrong it would be to see in these engravings, these paintings, these drawings nothing but defeated pessimism. To sing of death, to dance with it  – to make images of it too, to embrace it and slap it heartily on the back as Spanish tradition does – is, after all, another way of affirming what Canetti offered in response to his homicidal question: “It is better to live so intensely that no one can die.” It is indeed a matter of ghosts who never really die; it is a matter of spirits, of survivors.

Photo credit: Pol Taburet, Papa Tonnerre's Tales, 2025, lithograph, Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York