Through her figurative paintings, Claire Tabouret analyses the concept of identity, childhood, and its related enigmas. For this purpose, she presents the individual either isolated or within a group. Her enigmatic portraits and group scenes range from the theatrical to the introspective, capturing her figures engaged in a range of activities, ranging from dancing and wrestling to quiet introspection. For both subjects and compositions, Tabouret draws inspiration from magazines and history books, filtering found photographs through her expressive brushstroke and vivid pigments.

Dancers is an exceptional example of the artist’s distinctive style, where figures are standing upright, frozen, in front of the viewer. The dancers are characterised by a child-like appearance, as is typical in Tabouret’s works. She described these emotionally-charged figures as “...in a peculiar mood: they’re not sad, but solemn and serious. This is a kind of resistance. There is latent, contained violence and anger in these children’s gazes” (Claire Tabouret in conversation with Lea Bismuth: ‘I want to make those energies visible’, Claire Tabouret, 7 February 2014, online). Despite the dynamic nature of the subject, widely explored through history by artists such as Edgar Degas, Tabouret depicts her figures in a very still manner. The overall composition is characterised by a nostalgic tone, further enhanced by the quasi-ghostly appearance of the third figure from the left, conveyed through the lightly marked contours and paler shades which denote her body and gown. This effect is reminiscent of “spirit photography”, a technique widely pursued in the 19th century, which captured transparent figures by means of protracted exposures. Layers of ghostly impressions permeate the overall composition, articulated within the artist’s textured surfaces, non-naturalistic, almost.mes tallic, palette and historical appropriation of subjects.

Through brushwork and chromatic palette, Tabouret paints her figures out of any spatial and temporal dimension, placing the viewer in the middle of an ongoing story that feels at once familiar and alien. Tabouret’s choice of blue as the predominant tone is weighted in art history, most notably in reference to Pablo Picasso, where colour alluded to the subject’s psychological state. With regards to her pioneering technique, Tabouret has credited on multiple occasions, her early encounter with Claude Monet’s Water Lilies from the artist’s Nympheas series at four years old. She was particularly fascinated by the play of light, and applied the idea of evanescence to her subject’s expressions.

In Dancers, a tension prevails between the individual and the mass, an effect that results from the artist’s adept treatment of the eyes. By portraying figures in groups, Tabouret reflects on the relationship between the psychological and the social, enabling her to explore through her paintings the existential investigations which she has come to internally scrutinise.