Xavier Toubes

A European sensibility remains in Toubes’ practice even after two decades spent in the US, the ghostly figurative presence in ‘Exquisite Nomads Head’ remarkably classical for so light a set of features. Roughly worked into shape with palms, the clay has had seemingly random patchworks of colour applied in smeared, rainbowed clusters to vivid and shocking effect — allegorical to messes of plasticine or melted ice cream.