About three years ago, real-life writer Matthieu Peck was invited to travel to Bahia, Brazil, by real-life artist Pol Taburet, to pen an essay for a forthcoming catalog of his paintings. Peck did not write that essay. Instead, he wrote Descente à Bahia—a novel about fictional writer Martin Reger, who travels to Bahia, Brazil, on an invitation to pen an essay for his artist friend… Pol Taburet. An insomniac running on “speed, alcohol, and bad faith,” Reger records his time in Taburet’s studio and Bahia’s jungles through journal entries that reflexively narrate their own composition.
As much as it is a literary experiment in the interdigitation of fiction and reality, the book is also a portrait of a singular friendship and the intimate work of witnessing another’s creative process—and putting it into words. Newly translated from the original French, Descent to Bahia was released this week by Hela Press and features new drawings by Taburet. To mark the occasion, the close friends sat down for a conversation with CULTURED.
Tell me a little bit about your relationship before the trip to Bahia.
Matthieu Peck: Pol and I used to hang a lot in Paris. We spent nights talking about painting—talking about everything—having drinks, having parties. We were considering me coming to the studio for a longer time, but we couldn’t really find the moment. So when Pol got invited to Brazil, he asked me, “Do you want to write the catalog?” I said yes, but it was more an excuse for us to spend time together without other people. You have to be friends in a really intimate way to get into a painter’s studio. If you’re a painter, and you have someone you don’t know very well standing behind you, I’m not sure you can paint like you want to. But Pol can say better than me.
Pol Taburet: It’s not with everyone that I have this type of intimacy—it’s an intellectual intimacy, but also a very sensitive one. When I proposed that he come to Brazil, it was like, let’s make this conversation that we have in Paris longer and deeper. It was a beautiful excuse to spend more time together, but also we were creating a story together, in a sense. Matthieu was seeing the whole process of creation in the studio, which is something I normally don’t show at all. I don’t show my paintings to my girlfriend or my parents when I’m working on them, but with Matthieu there is something about him that… I feel allowed to show it.
Matthieu, the way your descriptions of Pol’s paintings translate the visual into the verbal is quite gorgeous. But most striking to me was how you captured the dynamism of Pol’s creative process itself. Pol, do you recognize your practice in what Matthieu has written?
Taburet: This is the first time I’ve seen a text that is accurate to how I experience the process of painting. Matthieu really captured that. I had this room upstairs [overlooking the studio], and Matthieu was looking down from this room. I could not feel him watching me, but I think he saw every gesture exactly. He is very attentive; that’s his talent.
I have to say, I was surprised when I read the novel. It’s weird to see someone depicting something that you felt. It’s very rare. It was like a direct connection to this memory, you know?
Peck: Having access to the studio allows you to write not only about what’s appearing on the canvas, but the energy that a painter is giving it. What was most interesting to me was the beast in a cage that a painter can be with the canvas. You can feel, being in the studio, something you’re not seeing when you just look at the paintings at a show. Pol at this time was painting with the canvas horizontal, and so he was always moving around. Really naively, I thought painters always worked on the wall, so it was really interesting to write about this.
Pol, when did you begin working on the drawings for the English edition, and how did you envision their role in the book? They’re clearly responding to the text around them, but they aren’t direct illustrations of particular scenes.
Taburet: It’s funny because the first time I started to draw these, it was not for the book. We were together having wine and cigarettes at Matthieu’s place, and he wanted to read the book out loud to me. As Matthieu was reading some key pages, I just started to draw very naturally. Some of his words in the book resonated for me as images. It’s like when you’re a kid and parents read you a story, the way your imagination starts to work with the images. I lived the reality of this book, but there are also all these fictional parts and ways that Matthieu depicts things. It was very fertile for me.
I was going to ask how you both relate to the “fictional” versions of yourselves, but “fiction” might not be the right word to describe how Pol shows up in the book, so how about the “textual” versions of yourselves? Matthieu, how do you understand the narrator, who you named “Martin,” in relation to yourself? And Pol, what is it like to read yourself refracted through your friend’s eyes?
Taburet: It was a very weird feeling to be inside reality and fiction at the same time. At the beginning, I asked Matthieu, do you really want to keep my name as “Pol”? Because you have “Martin,” who is a character, and you have me, who is real. So, for me, Martin is the fiction inside the book, and I’m kind of like the reality, but those spaces are combined. I was afraid, because part of my life would be revealed by the book. While reading it, I came back to Matthieu saying, “Oh la la, maybe we should not say that about me.” But now that I re-read—and my girlfriend is reading it now, actually—it’s a real pleasure because it’s an archive of life. It’s a crystallized moment that we share. I think both of us wanted that, to have this friendship crystallized.
Peck: Of course painting is at the center of the book, but it’s mostly about friendship. Pol is right; it’s about trying to crystallize a moment of life. Using a different name allows me to blur the line—the fictional parts of the book are mostly on the Martin side, because almost everything that happens in the studio is real.
I’m a journalist, and I really like first-person journalism, and with this book I tried to link the two. I think the novel is still the supreme form of literature—there’s a way of hiding messages and ideas in characters that, for me, is even stronger than journalism. I use a lot of references from the past: Stendhal or Dostoevsky; I like Le Grand Siècle, as we say in French, 16th- and 17th-century literature. In those days, there were not “novels.” They were able to write a sentence really, really short and give a lot of truth inside of it—like an aphorism. So for me, a good novel is a story you can read really fluently; it’s not only a matter of the characters, it’s the writing and the sharpness of even a very small sentence.
The novel is so rooted in Bahia’s geography; sometimes you’re almost flirting with the genre of travel writing.
Peck: Geography is really serious in my writing. But it was tricky, to be honest, because I don’t like travel writing that much. It can be really boring—or you have to be a really good writer—but I tried to cheat by writing about traveling without talking about traveling. For example, maybe a third of the book is just actually being in the streets of Bahia, or in the market—nothing happens really, but it’s a whole world. We were together, but I know Pol didn’t experience it as I did. When he read the book, he was like, “I know the market was a bit rude and everything, but you made it really dark.” Yes, the market was also really colorful and joyful, but I wanted to focus on this dark side. Pol was focusing on different things, and I think it’s funny for him to read a different version of the reality he experienced.
Taburet: Yes, it’s the vision of Matthieu, because my eyes were stimulated by other stuff.
Martin’s experience of Bahia is so inflected by the legacies of enslavement that permeate Salvador, which was a port city at the epicenter of the slave trade during Portuguese colonial rule. There can be a real atmosphere in places built on that kind of deep violence that I think your writing captures pretty viscerally.
Peck: When you go to the to the Pelourhino you actually feel it. I couldn’t explain this, really—it’s in the walls, it’s in the air.
Taburet: Yeah, completely. It’s not “haunted” in a ghost way, but it’s a city that carries history in a very dense way. It’s a bit like when a storm is coming, and suddenly the atmosphere starts to feel heavy. It’s also present in the architecture. Both Matthieu and I were struck by this church near the Pelourinho. It was built by enslaved Black people in Bahia, but it’s kind of Portuguese Baroque, full of gold, and inside you have services that are very Brazilian, so it has intense music and energy as well. The character of the city, the history of the city, and also the very dark past of this country is, I think, completely captured in that space.
Were there parts of your time in Brazil that didn’t make it into the book?
Peck: After Bahia, we went to São Paulo, and I didn’t even try to start writing there. In Bahia, the book came by itself; I didn’t have to push it. In São Paolo, I didn’t have the same feeling at all. There were more people around us, and I wanted to keep the book between two people. But otherwise, almost everything is there.
Taburet: Yeah, there are some little secrets we keep for ourselves, of course.
Peck: It’s a bit complicated for us to talk about because this trip was three years ago. Maybe like in 30 years we can read it and have fun. It’ll bring memories.
Taburet: We should do it again!
Yeah, when’s the sequel?
Taburet: I would be super down.
Peck: We still work together on some projects.
I thought the very end of the book was particularly beautiful—the writing and the images.
Peck: I tried to make it a blur. For me, it’s the most important moment of the book because it’s just Pol and me having a pure moment of joy in front of the sea. It’s literally the most honest thing in the book—I remember looking at the city by the sea and laughing. I would like the book to be like that—something you look into from the outside. You can be part of it or not, but you know it leaves something on you, I hope.
Taburet: Complètement. In the book, there’s this moment in a bar with Bob Marley playing over the radio. I think both of us had this experience when a moment is so beautiful that you have a kind of pre-nostalgia. We knew it was beautiful; we were seeing the same thing and feeling the same thing.
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