Someone is knocking. Three knocks, slow but determined. You’re reluctant to open. You don’t. You listen to see whether the intruder has left. But he hasn’t, he insists. You open. That’s how the figures painted by Claire Tabouret made me feel: as though they were behind the door, not at all surprised to be there, whereas we have to admit that we were, yes, somewhat, because no, we weren’t quite expecting them… at least not so early, or perhaps not so late, or at any rate, not here. But these faces emerging from grayness or the greenish glow of a sickly light are certain they’re at the right place, at the right time.

There is something anachronistic and inappropriate about painting today, in 2014. This doesn’t bother painting: it has no trouble seeing itself that way. It’s gotten used to it. Its death has been proclaimed so many times that it’s comfortable with it. Attempting to revive or resurrect it would be wrong: it can’t pretend nothing’s happened. Neither can we. Still, dead or alive, it does come back regularly to knock at our door. And when we open, it’s standing there, neither dead nor alive, but like the living dead, or rather like an impassive ghost come to claim its dues. Not intact: it bears the traces of years spent in the shadows. But though it may be doddering, it seldom looks like a daub.

Doddering, because it belongs to a tradition whose syntax and tools, not to mention its gestures, has more or less remained unchanged for centuries. As is often the case, this heritage is both a burden and a boon. Some have cast it aside and disowned it, others have cashed in on it until they’d spent it all. Claire Tabouret has invested it and put it to the test. The point isn’t to ruin painting, to inflict the torments of deconstruction on it, or to extend it beyond the limits of the frame. It isn’t to smear the surface of the canvas until matter supersedes subject. The canvas isn’t turned into a daub. To put it another way, if the artist is willing to intertwine lines, hair or draped fabrics (we’ll be getting back to this), she never gets her wires crossed. If this isn’t the painting of chaos, or the chaos of painting, it is nevertheless dented, discolored painting. She’s not trying to reclaim her palette, but rather to invent her own color, however glaucous it may turn out to be. “Glaucous”: that’s what the green adopted by the painter of La Grande Camisole is called. Which merits comment.
It has the livid hues of the heartsick. It hums with the indifferent glow of hospital fluorescent lights. It is both dull and toxic, radioactive in the zones where yellows warms it from beneath. Verdigris, the color taken on by copper objects when exposed to air, is a cousin of this glaucous green. Which has seeped into movies since it is the default color of fantasy creatures, zombies, assorted gremlins, slavering monsters come back from the netherworld to settle their scores with the living. This supernatural palette lights Claire Tabouret’s large canvas. Or rather, it is the canvas itself that emits a greenish light, which seems to come from within, from the folds of the children’s blouses. They radiate. They are glowing. Not with joy, as you’ll have understood by now. Bound by their « straightjacket », huddled against each other, lined up, piled up, crammed together until they are as one, a single group, a single monstrously united being, they no longer have space to express themselves. Granted, their face, their eyes, their pouts, the sullen expression they share are telling. But we’d like to think that you have to look elsewhere, inside the folds or between the lines, for a sign of theirs. Or rather, for a sign of painting itself: the green shrouding the children’s blouses with a supernatural halo could well be the sign of a discrete presence, a portent of the return of Painting. Oxidized, glowing with a glaucous but powerful radiance, it also manifests itself, between the kids, through the weird black eye-shaped spots scattered here and there.

You see? To be frank, we’re not quite sure ourselves, not quite sure we’re not seeing things… But isn’t that one of the laws of the fantasy genre? The narrator has nagging doubts. Did he really see what he thought he saw? If so, how can he share it? How can he bear witness? For that matter, the fact that you can see Claire Tabouret’s pictures with your own eyes, that each of you can therefore form an opinion, is of some concern to your humble servant…is he mad as a hatter? Especially since another painting, Les Liens, induces the same delusions. Strange anthropomorphic shadows emerge from the tangles of the figures’ long black hair. Worse yet, these stringy trains obviously don’t represent hair since they seem to come out of the bellies of at least four of the quiet children in the painting. In fact, when you peer at the skein of stiff, thick lines on the lower edge of the canvas, Brice Marden and the voluptuous wandering of his abstract paintings come to mind. We are also reminded that the little girls’ long plaited hair was once a compulsory, imposed hairstyle. And if what was coming back here, through painting, was a bevy of young girls bound by their plaits throwing back at our faces the past condition of women?

Indeed, in Tabouret’s work, the portrait (of groups) is a hardy genre, like plants, like that plenteous hair. So hardy it has turned poisonous, vindictive, demanding. Including culturally or socially. In other words, what’s coming back in these paintings is not painting itself. Beyond modernist self-referentiality (which we love), her paintings look at the world and at the people in it. Especially since they (Les Solitaires, 2011) look you straight in the eye when they knock at your door. When you crack it open. Men and women huddle in a boat, so tightly that they look like a shapeless mass at first sight. A gray dawn drowns them in a dull light, blotting out volumes. Their features blend into the water and fog. They are adrift (the engine is out of the water) and painting keeps them at a good distance. In fact, they’re caught in the ebb and flow of the paintbrush, of its movements on the surface of the canvas. The migrants, endlessly repelled from European coasts, belong to the shadows. They are depicted as such: discreet if not invisible, with hoods on their heads, they lie low in the gray background of the picture, still resilient but in poor shape, both determined and resigned to not quite finding their place. And when a yellow ray outlines their silhouette, they turn their back to it.

To my knowledge, in Tabouret’s painting, this type of scene hasn’t reoccurred since her series on migrants leaving for or reaching our coasts. The characters she depicts stand up to us. They seem determined not to turn their back on us. They face us, pointedly. They pose, in groups, in a corner, united, organized, accomplices skulking in the rusty chiaroscuro of a house in the woods in Dans les Bois (2013). The russet rays of a supernatural moon streaking the silhouettes of mischievous children disguised as deer hides rather than unmasks them. But still, they face us and if their faces stay hidden, it is because they are transmogrified by their night-time games. In this case, the models’ metamorphosis is deliberate make-believe, unlike the more insidious transformation taking place in La Grande Camisole. It is no less edifying or strictly pictorial. In Dans les Bois, a reddish ray filtering through the multi-paned window (coming from the left, according to a representational model we won’t elaborate on… but which also seems to scan the figures) reveals the surprising presence of very young protagonists, who should be in bed (at that hour) or in the closet (considering the era). The figure furthest to the left, draped in a long tunic, wearing a hood (ghost never go bare-headed) is obviously playing a more serious, macabre game. But all of them seem to be posing. As in all of Tabouret’s recent portraits of groups, there is something photographic in the positioning of the characters (if only because they look as though they were inspired by old class photographs): these kids seem to be waiting patiently, without moving, to get their picture taken.

We could therefore formulate the following hypothesis: painting might well be an undertaking to catch, to pull out of the closet, those who have never been represented and have been biding their time. We could even venture a further hypothesis: just as there once was a spiritualist photography, there is now a spiritualist painting, whose aim is to render visible those the world doesn’t deign or hasn’t deigned to see, beings who have been posing for years, who have been knocking at the door, at least since the start of this piece. Painting knows what it’s getting into. It too is considered anachronistic and obsolete, as we’ve already stated; it has lost its credibility as a reliable representational mode. Tabouret’s painting is not reliable either, and it doesn’t care to be, since she depicts glitches of reality, beings fallen through cracks (of time and space). Therefore, her painting is haunted, as we are haunted by all the beings waiting for us to open the door. And since ectoplasms can pass through walls and have the gift of ubiquity, appearing here and there where they are least expected, Tabouret must show them, extract them from the group to make individual portraits in which each character goes off on his own, voluntary exiles breaking free, leaving the family portrait, taking their distance.

One figure may well sum up this trajectory, perhaps not symbolic, but, let’s say, exemplary. It is a singular figure. First because it is nameable: in Tabouret’s work, it appears to be the only one that can be identified (apart from her self-portraits). It is also the only one to reappear four times. There are indeed four small portraits of Isabelle Eberhardt. All are very engaging: they show a wary young woman, frowning and glaring. Each reflects a period in the life of this Swiss-born adventurer of Russian descent, converted to Islam in the early 20th century, who lived in Algeria like the natives rather than the settlers. She is thus shown in Western, then Oriental garb; as a woman, then as a man (since she chose to cross-dress for a while). The only named figure in Tabouret’s portraits is therefore a woman who defied gender conventions and lived out a defiantly free existence. To capture Isabelle Eberhardt’s tortuous path, the artist has followed her model closely (the portraits are tightly framed) and at length (no less than four portraits), though she knows she’s wasting her time: how can you make the portrait of someone who didn’t want to look like what her background, origins and gender intended her to be? How, if not by instilling into portrait as a genre, the same kind of trouble her model introduced in gender identity?

Judicael Lavrador