MICHEL TABORI: No Time To Pretend

The title—No Time To Pretend—for the latest exhibition of mixed media paintings from Venice artist Michel Tabori—is far from the dire admonition it may seem to suggest. It’s a double pun on the title of the popular MGMT song “Time to Pretend” that inspired a pair of works in the exhibition. But as with everything Tabori makes, it is both more complex and much simpler than that. Confronting this exuberant, revved-up suite of recent paintings it’s clear why Tabori feels there’s no time to pretend—because life is already too full of beauty to be ignored. On the other hand, these paintings are also about stone-groove, guitar-driven, arena Rock (he even painted on a custom Joe Veillette guitar during this process); and, as they always are, they’re about the way color and light create depth and optical dynamics conduct emotion.

Tabori’s work, first as a film director and later as a painter, has always shown an interest in solving the twin problems of form and content. His cinematic vision certainly endures, as abstraction and representation tussle in composing a frame that moves the story and also holds the eye. That’s where the Rock N Roll comes back in. At a time when Tabori was already using pieces of text as elements of composition, experimenting with its potential as a formal cousin to mark-making and delineator of space, he was also becoming aware of how deeply music was affecting his content. Deliberately privileging the performative and subliminal aspects of making art, and belying the claim to non-narration made for the text, “Rock Star” was born of a synesthesia between sight and sound, form and meaning. As the character “R” morphs into a female silhouette, words and image-glyphs organize ambient red light into an architectural space—and this space reads as vast until a drum set in the corner catches the eye and shrinks the space’s scale down to an intimate concert hall. It’s a kind of typological architecture that functions in all the works in the series, where depth is generated through color alone and parsed by the floating word.

--Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2009

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