Tarot card number 13, Death, has always fascinated me, not because I have any particular affinity for the practice – I’ve never really understood Tarot, and I barely grasp it even when someone reads the cards for me. However, despite its name and imagery (in the Marseille Tarot, the card only displayed the number, as people avoided naming Death altogether), its meaning is fluid. A doorway, a metamorphosis, something that transforms. A renewal, a journey, a tension.

I thought about Tarot—this card in particular—because it’s that same tension I felt standing before the ten canvases and drawings Pol Taburet presented in Madrid at the Pabellón de los Hexágonos. The exhibition, Oh, Si Os Pudiera Escuchar (Oh, If Only I Could Listen) curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and organized by Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid (the Madrid counterpart to its Turin-based foundation), confronts us with something elusive, a conundrum that doesn’t fully resolve but instead holds together through a dark, almost unsettling aesthetic tension—one that is much heavier, deeper, and yet paradoxically calmer than in Taburet’s previous works. The works feel like different voices in a theater of the absurd, each attempting to speak, to be heard, yet all silenced, muted by the weight of their own tension. The exhibition also includes a sound piece that seems to break through this silence, offering a contrast to the muted, unresolved cacophony created by the paintings.

I found it intriguing that in the interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist published in the exhibition catalog, the artist revealed that one of his sources of inspiration was Tarot—specifically, the Surrealist deck of Breton. Just like his paintings, these were syncretic, more tied to the unconscious and word association than to any real divinatory function. They drew heavily from Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, merging ancient symbols with the concept of the unconscious, fusing esotericism, psychoanalytic theory, and artistic imagination. More than a tool for fortune-telling, they became an experiment in exploring the subconscious and creativity itself (funny enough, at the very same time that Taburet’s exhibition opened, Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid was hosting a show on Max Ernst, featuring the Surrealist Tarot deck).

And just like in the subconscious, Taburet’s figures emerge like ghosts—fluid, shifting, tense but calm all at once. The artist drew inspiration from Goya’s paintings at the Prado, particularly the Pinturas Negras, which Goya created in a deeply distressing moment of his life, with an unflinching gaze into the dark human unconscious. Taburet’s works, painted in a palette that feels almost ominous, evoke many things. The bodies he depicts are slightly grotesque yet inviting—oxymoronic. They transform, moving from one state to another, animalistic but strangely tender. They exist in a space of violent calm.

It’s no coincidence that the artist built this exhibition around a visual language of violence—needles, pins, knives. Sharp elements, like the bodies of his figures, many of whom are hooded, caught between the sacred, the profane, and the executioner. These hoods, on one hand, recall a folkloric world of mystics, visionaries, seers, witches and religious processions (another nod to Goya). But at the same time, they carry a much darker, inescapable reference: the unmistakable silhouette of the Ku Klux Klan. A reflection on power, on the unspoken—intensified by the almost sacred dimension of the exhibition space itself, the Pabellón de los Hexágonos, designed by the architects José Antonio Corrales and Ramón Vázquez Molezún in 1958, suspended somewhere between a chapel and, with its peculiar structure, a forest of umbrellas.

These eerie, liminal bodies, hover in what feels like a Dantean limbo, another clear reference. They are suspended figures, half-formed, floating due to the way the works are displayed, mounted on metal structures and lifted into the air.

Then there’s the white. It recurs obsessively—in the teeth of some characters (one piece is even titled Very white teeth, waxed tongue, 2025), but most strikingly in the repeated motif of the white tablecloth. It disrupts the unsettling calm of the works, slicing through with a kind of violent discord. The white tablecloth—almost an aristocratic symbol of power—collides with Taburet’s shapeshifting figures. In his interview with Obrist, he refers to them as “black bodies, invisible bodies,” emphasizing an undercurrent of power tension. The tension I first felt in the Death card now seems to find its explanation. Interestingly, the Pinturas Negras were such a clear reference—paintings Goya made at the end of his life, disillusioned and bitter about post-Napoleonic Spain, portraying nothing but anguish and despair. Could it be that Pol Taburet is channeling that same tension, reflecting a feeling we experience in the world today?

As Ben Okri concludes in the poem written for the artist’s catalog of the show: “That’s what art does, allegorize the unspeakable, with a mouth full of stone, but vomiting gold.”

The exhibition is on view at the Pabellón de los Hexágonos, in Madrid, until April 20.