First of all, there are paintings.
Paintings of two types. One, suffused with an eerie, purplish light; the other, bathed in a grey atmosphere veering on bluish-green. Both uncompromising, different in style but similarly minimal. The two sides of night, as it were. If not of night, then of depth and gravity, weight and interiority. For Claire Tabouret, choosing to become a painter stemmed from an intuition: she knew she wanted to be one very early on. As though the choice had been made for her – in spite of her? –, and she couldn’t go against it. Sensitive to what the philosopher Michel Guérin wrote about painting, especially that “painting is not made of old memories, it goes back to such immemorial times that time has taken root in it” [1], Tabouret plays on the passage of time, the memory of places, the process of appearance and disappearance. In doing so, she strives to achieve « like a tightrope walker, a delicate balance, a position that must always be adjusted.”[2]
If it turned out to be an imperative, her decision to become a painter was also conscious and deliberate. The artist says she was always struck by the fact that painters make up “a special family”. That they have an operational mode in the studio, a sensual relationship to matter, a daily practice akin to self-discipline. In short, that their stance preserves them from outside intrusions. If these thoughts are unencumbered by nostalgia, it is because Tabouret’s approach is driven by a persistent quest for embodiment; a fully existential engagement of body and mind. Once more, what is verified here is – as we like to claim – that the luxury of painting is to take one’s time, and that the luxury of painters is to give their time to painting.

So, painting.
Claire Tabouret started out by painting landscapes. Of two kinds. The first, depicting flooded houses, are characteristic of her work on lines, painstakingly traced with acrylic paint diluted on paper, in shades of blue and violet that endow them with an oddly spectral appearance. Deserted by their human occupants, these houses act as substitute portraits of them. Their looming mass, doubled by their reflection in water, conjures a mental burden. A disquieting calm pervades these landscapes in which everything contributes to evince engulfment: the dark outline of trees, trunks, branches and leaves, the colors of the twilight sky – light bordering on extinction.
The second type of landscape shows various subjects, such as abandoned tents or stranded rafts. Like the houses, no clue whatsoever – geographic, economic or cultural – is given as to their owners. The gray palette chosen by the artist enhances their anonymity and universal value. They are as many signs of a suspended story, a private narrative, a freeze-frame whose evocative power stems from the brutally succinct manner in which the painter depicts them. What is obviously at stake here are human dramas in which humans are not shown. Thus, tents and rafts are imbued with a troubling presence that conjures absent bodies. “My paintings often start with pictures found on the internet”, the painter explains.[3] “These images are like the clamor of a dislocated world. My painting is shot through with the shards of current events. Some images imprint themselves lastingly on my retina, and those are the ones I paint.” What Tabouret doesn’t say is that before anything else, she transforms them; “those” are the ones she knows are good for painting. To quote Manet: “Painting is nothing else than painting, it expresses nothing but itself.”[4]

Painting, still.
Implied, contained within the image in the silent thickness of pictorial matter, the figure could not stay hidden indefinitely. It had to appear, and it did, shifting from the painter’s retina to her canvas. “For me, to paint one of these visions is to squeeze the image, to wring it”, she explains. “I try to extract an inner light from it, a tenuous clue.”[5] The figure makes its appearance in Tabouret’s painting within groups of indistinguishable characters packed in drifting boats. This emergence, and the artist’s will to extract her figures from their lack of differentiation, to give them embodiment, assimilates her process to a maieutics of sorts. Though she can’t yet separate them so that they can be told apart and considered in the fullness of their identity, Tabouret makes them look straight at the viewer, as a way of freeing, of individualizing them. Of making them exist in their own right.
In order to do so, the painter must multiply clues and formats, from the smallest to the largest scale, and ultimately, forget her subject to let painting self-produce. The procedures and protocols she implements, playing on the dissolution of form as much as on its epiphany, enable her to reach the Other on the opposite shore, which is never more than our projection of ourselves. The hieratic figure of a man seen from the back, both mental and monumental, becomes the perfect metaphor for the possibility of the Other.
Tabouret’s painting throws a bridge between identity and alterity. As fate would have it, it has led her to a small island that offered itself up as a land to explore. The treasure she found there – a set of old family pictures – validated her approach: an investigation on memory and the senses in which the artist puts herself to the test of “the difficulty of saying where we come from, what we are, between one country and another, feminine and masculine”[6], bearing witness to a permanent back-and-forth from day to night and vice-versa.
Cohorts of rebellious, confrontational children and teenagers then made their appearance. In this intractable face-off, they often wear disguises, as though the only possible way out was to hide. Tabouret lines up their figures in tight ranks, anonymous yet familiar, strange yet commonplace, their only embodied reality in their faces and hands. Figures of children drowned in bluish-green light, sometimes blindfolded, united by the up-strokes and down-strokes of the pictorial flow, lit by glowsticks. Confronted with these uncommonly powerful, insolent paintings, we are literally dismissed from our function as viewers. Roles are reversed: we no longer look at the painting, it is the painting that looks at us. The painter’s faces aren’t faces but masks, and it is from behind their masks that these faces glare at us. As soon as our eyes meet theirs, we can’t look away; they catch us, overwhelm us, engulf us within the abyss of painting.

Then, there is India ink.
Tabouret uses it to fix her own features in a nearly daily exercise. On a table in her studio, she has set a board on which she stretches sheets of rice paper, and hung a mirror on the wall. You can’t confront others without having to meet yourself. If self-portrait is a drastic genre which compels its author to deal with reality, its execution is, for the artist, the best way to avoid losing herself in the representation of the figures she shows. At the beginning, she says, was a sentence taken from a novel by Yoko Tawada[7] : “They say the human body is eighty percent water, so it’s not surprising that a different face appears every morning in the mirror.” It’s hard, then, not to think that this series of self-portraits is a kind of outlet, a way of distancing herself from painting. In order to save her own image.

Finally, there is sculpture.
From the outset, in the same way as painting, it became a necessity for the artist, as though surface were not enough to express the presence of her figures. She needed to endow them with alterity. Her decision to translate some of them into volume by literally making them come out of her paintings ties in with the need for embodiment that drives each of her actions. Modeling and glazing techniques seemed like the most appropriate solutions to respond to this need. “It is a way of extending my work on characters I’m not ready to relinquish yet”, she explains, referring to her painting Les Insoumis (2013), from which she drew her first nine busts. “I had learned to know them intimately during the relatively lengthy time I took to make the painting. » From painting to sculpture, the only difference is what distinguishes one mode of expression from the other, yet the unreality of her painted figures takes on a kind of overloaded presence in sculpture.

“I had learned to know them intimately…” says the artist. Intimacy. It is the fundamental drive of Tabouret’s approach; what her art requires. The vector that motivates each of her pieces. The existential arch, from exteriority to interiority, between identity and alterity, which joins all her figures, whether painted, drawn or sculpted, to the gazes that turn towards them: hers, ours, and even theirs. Intimacy, as the superlative expression of interiority.


Philippe Piguet


[1] - Michel Guérin, L’Origine de la peinture, Editions Encre Marine, 2013.
[2] - Cf. Text written by the artist for her solo exhibition at the Isabelle Gounod gallery in January-February 2012.
[3] - Cf. the artist’s statement of intent in an application for a residency, April 21st 2011.
[4] - Quoted by Antonin Proust in Edouard Manet : souvenirs, L'Échoppe, Paris, 1996.
[5] - Cf. note 3.
[6] - Cf. note 2.
[7] - Yoko Tawada, Journal des jours tremblants. Après Fukushima, Verdier, 2012.