FLUFFY PAINTINGS
Figures of grave and pensive children operate as the remanent, potent sign of Claire Tabouret's painting. Does this mean that this artist's world is fundamentally constituted by that shadow cast by childhood?
The particularity of the landscape paintings shown here is that they were executed on coloured synthetic fur and were referred to by the artist in her Los Angeles studio as 'fluffy landscape paintings.' Paintings reified as comfort blankets, transitional objects? Their imposing size suggests something more like a thwarted approach to painting, between sensuality and the roughness of the material. Tabouret likes to test her technique, her fluency against new constraints. For this exhibition, we might speak of a dialectic of contrary gestures: confronted with these vast landscapes painted over time, with returns and an emphasis on these obdurate supports, she deploys a series of monotypes of flowers that are fluid and refined.
Claire Tabouret often recalls the seminal importance of Monet's Water Lilies in her desire to be a painter and readily places her work under the watery sign of what moves, ever since her first paintings of 'flooded houses' and her migrants' boats. Here again, for this Parisian season, she is unfolding a set of pieces—sculptures of bathers, vases of flowers in ceramic or monotype, those vaguely Mediterranean or Californian seascapes—whose guiding thread could be water. However, more than any theme, the point is the fluid, shifting treatment of form and, here, above all, the technique, the process. The studio flooded with water to keep the clay wet or fluidify the paint that is ineluctably absorbed by the fake fur.
Monet spoke of his Water Lilies as an almost unachievable project: 'I have taken up things impossible to do: water with grass that undulates in the depths, it is admirable to see, but it is enough to drive one mad to wish to do it. I always attack things like that.'1 If there was something tragic in Monet's quest, with Tabouret melancholy neighbours games, playfulness and chance, which are constants in the evocation of childhood. So it is that the artist sets up a tension in her painting by means of technical constraint, aspiring to a match between her iconography and its pictorial and material embodiments, in a series of technico-poetic variations. I mentioned reification: an undisguised attraction to volumetry in her sculptural work, her practice of modelling, begun some years ago and indicative of the desire for an almost sensual fusion with the material. For the exhibition If only the sea could sleep, at Le Hangar à Bananes in Nantes, she painted the struggles of love on recuperated boat sails and confronted the difficulty of monumental scale and unusual pigments—boat engine oil, rust—as a way of engaging physically with the support. With her 'fluffy' paintings, Tabouret has come back to landscape, transposing her chromatic system of covering a bright, solid coloured surface to the use of fluorescent synthetic fur as a support. The composition's muted radiance becomes more assertive, more luminous than in her dark and metaphysical series of flooded houses (2010/11). The Cézannian character of these maritime views is clearly perceptible. Among other photographic sources, the artist has focused on the reproduction of a small landscape by Morandi, almost a sketch, in which the touch is very visible, almost mason-like, in notches. The chromatic, vibratory quality of the big pink landscape with its zones enlivened by contrasting touches, from dots to scratches, evokes certain paintings made by Matisse and Derain in Collioure.
The 'breaking-up' effected against the synthetic grounds in candy pink or electric blue serves a kind of Pop-style derealisation of the landscapes that very much fits in the context of American art, especially on the West Coast. One thinks more specifically of the painting of Romare Bearden, inspired by the vernacular practice of the patchwork quilt, or, today, of Henry Taylor, Faith Ringgold and Mikalene Thomas. But also of David Hockney's views of canyons in the 1980s which, by their lively, simple colours, sinuous, linear drawing and composition in blocks of colour constitute stylised landscapes that are emblematic of Californian Pop. And that British artist comes to mind again when looking at the series of bouquets, monotypes that are more 'shifting' and undecided, more 'suggestive' than the clear-cut and incisive little paintings, engravings or iPad paintings that Hockney makes almost every day. The practice of the monotype on a Plexiglas plaque forms the exact counterpoint to the paintings in fake fur, by virtue of the speed, the fluidity and the seriality of the process. Should this be seen as a kind of everyday exercise in the manner of the self-portraits in ink on rice paper that the artist produced in large quantities after a stay in Beijing, and that she described as her 'studio ritual'? Painting a bouquet is often—for Renoir, for Matisse and for Hockney—a way of doing one's scales, a kind of exercise in pure painting. Tabouret speaks of automatic writing, to be contrasted with the slow, hesitant and powerful gestation of the landscapes on carpet, a bit like interiorised recompositions, collages of multiple visual sources and sensations. By the technique of the monotype she orchestrates extremely subtle variations and permutations of colour from a single motif, thereby generating the idea of redoubling and disappearance, the kind of melancholy that-has-been which Barthes attributed to photography.
Pink or blue landscapes, myriad bouquets of roses, of tulips, of honeysuckle, like so many colourful, positive and negative combinations of lemon yellow, sea green, emerald blue, tea pink or sienna brown: Claire Tabouret creates an enchanted garden.
Text by Cécile Debray, 8 August 2021. Courtesy Perrotin.