“I get to imagine and experience certain things through my painting,” Claire Tabouret said something along those lines during the opening of her big solo at Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands last week, shedding a different light on the works on view. Spanning the last 20 years of her career, the exhibition brings together works largely focused on portraiture: self-portraits, children’s portraits, bathers, the atmosphere of pandemic solitude, and imaginary group photos. Alongside these, one room is entirely dedicated to her landscape works, made on faux fur, allowing the artist to remain within the familiar field of painting while taking a completely different, unfamiliar path through it.
Knowing she’s from the south of France, I assumed that children bathers are her memories of growing up on the Mediterranean coast. I assumed we shared similar experiences of spending a few months a year as half terrestrial, half marine beings, the seawater dripping down our bodies (an element which she immortalized in her big bronze sculpture titled Fountain), our skin hardened as salt crystallized on the surface under the scorching sun. But it turns out that wasn’t entirely the case. Instead, #ClaireTabouret uses her artistic practice to experience things she may not have actually lived through. Rather than imagining entirely fantastical scenarios, she looks more closely at familiar ones: cloaking yourself in a hoodie, hiding behind makeup or a costume, sunbathing at the seaside, and the emotions that accompany such moments. Whether beachside shenanigans, studio life, motherhood, or the dynamics of being an individual within a constructed group, the artist uses paint and brush to relive these experiences in a different context, or perhaps for the first time.
Throughout the exhibition tour, Tabouret often referred to her practice as research. This notion shifts the perspective further and makes sense once you notice how often she repeats the same or similar themes. The idea is to explore how color and the way the subject is painted affect the image. First and foremost, for the artist as she’s bringing it to life, and then for the viewer, who experiences it within their own context. Also, I think this element makes the works so expressive, with washes of subdued tones often clashing with neon underpainting. Driven by exploration rather than representation, they feel sketched, drawn, or even unfinished. And this explorative element opens the work up to a variety of media, ranging from paintings, monoprints, sculptures, painted ceramics, to designs for stained-glass windows commissioned for Notre-Dame Cathedral (parts of which she shared with us during the tour), and the aforementioned paintings on faux fur. Blending exteriors and interiors, these gestural, almost abstract exercises arise from an urge to explore different dynamics between her tools, materials, processes, and finding her way through it all.
Text by Saša Bogojev
