Claire Tabouret

Claire Tabouret’s paintings are built within a tension related to their stasis, hence her preference for subjects that allow her to confront different degrees of actualization of the figure. Her depiction of partially flooded houses opposes constructed space to liquid space—their fixed, earthly form to the moving, dissolving one of their reflection in the water. Unfolding a reflective space, they confront different levels of visibility. “Remember that you were born liquid and that you will become liquid again.”

But like other painters of her generation, it is in the filmed image that Claire Tabouret finds that “other” of painting that nourishes it. These are images extracted from videos she makes while walking through cities or the countryside, preferably at dusk—like water, a matrix of all possibilities. These “diurnal residues” act as a filter that silences the immediate data of perception, retaining only a distant evocation of lights and masses with undefined contours. It is in this lack of visibility that Claire Tabouret travels mentally, blinding herself to better summon a memory of affects and to reconstruct a dense pictorial space.

Eternally bound to the liquid element in which they drift, the ghost ships that Claire Tabouret paints will never return to port. They recall the dream of the Romantic poet Novalis, who wrote in his Hymn to the Night: “Must morning always return? Is the reign of earthly things without end?” The landscapes she captures in twilight are pierced with dark lakes, veiled by curtains of foliage that absorb color and hold back the light—accomplices in this delay of ultimate vision.

Text by Marguerite Pilven
Translation: Triangle-Astérides

Six years after her residency at Astérides, Claire Tabouret looks back on the works she produced there for the exhibition Claire Tabouret & Cash for Gold like Smoke for Mirrors and Land for Sea, 2017.