'Personally I am fascinated by the concept of belonging to a community, the longing it creates, the terror it generates, like the inability to belong that I've always experienced.' —Claire TabouretThrough her paintings the Los Angeles based French artist Claire Tabouret explores notions of community and identity. As a child, Tabouret visited Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas at The Musée D’Orsay. She refers to this moment as an epiphany in desiring to become an artist. Tabouret’s group portraits depicting children are her most sought after works.
The Soccer Team, 2019, represents a group of young girls posing together as one would imagine a premier league team or a class photograph. The painting explores childhood and its enigmas while creating a utopian narrative for generations to come. The Soccer Team ironically alludes to the lack of women in the football arena and reinvents the context which surrounds the iconic sport, traditionally associated with men.
The monumental canvas transforms the team into life sized figures, gazing directly at the viewer. The photograph-like composition captures the players in pose while the theatricality of the arrangement emanates a mysterious atmosphere created by the tension of the fading colours, evoking both memories and dreams of a reality that does not yet exist. This painting allows Tabouret to construct a reality drawn from the evolution of personal experience, as a way to unfurl a universe of stories and memories.
The excessive scale of the work transforms it into a monument, or a triumph, immortalising a moment of glory. The heightened expressive manner draws attention to the paucity of the everyday and the need to invent a status for women in the way Tabouret believes they should be seen. The fact that the figures’ features are not distinguishable gives them a generic, universal quality which makes them recognisable to anyone.
Claire Tabouret’s striking paintings have allowed her to become one of the most sought-after contemporary artist. Addressing stirring subjects easily identifiable, the artist creates through her paintings a community of her own with the viewers.
Claire Tabouret on Claude Monet’s Les Nymphéas