Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, you who parade in galleries like constipated peacocks, pretending to see genius in every accidental paint stain fallen on a canvas. Claire Tabouret is not just a name to strategically drop in your conversations to impress your mother-in-law or your banker. No, while your favorite artists create installations made of garbage found in a dumpster that they dare call “a socio-political commentary on consumer society,” Tabouret, she, paints as if her life depended on it, with an intensity that would make your knees tremble if you really took the time to look.
This French woman exiled in Los Angeles possesses that rare gift of capturing the essence of a being, freezing the ephemeral while translating the perpetual movement that inhabits us all. Her canvases are inhabited by a ghostly presence, a spectral aura that grabs you from the first glance. A bit like when Proust dives into the meanders of involuntary memory, Tabouret explores the depths of identity, but never yielding to the ease of ornamental memory.
Whether in her portraits of wide-eyed children or in her multiple self-portraits that seem to duplicate like reflections in a broken mirror, Claire Tabouret practices an archeology of the human face with surgical precision. She dissects the layers of emotions that make us up, as if seeking to solve the impossible equation of our existence. That’s where the first reference imposes itself on me: Sartrean existentialism.
Remember this iconic formula of Jean-Paul Sartre in Existentialism Is a Humanism: “Existence precedes essence” [1]. This fundamental principle finds a striking echo in Tabouret’s work. Her characters are not defined by a pre-established nature but seem perpetually in the process of building themselves before our eyes. Take her series “Debutantes” (2015), these young women in ball gowns of bluish hues who fix us with a mixture of anxiety and determination. These figures perfectly embody this Sartrean notion that man “is first nothing” and must define himself by his acts and choices.
The faces Tabouret paints are like suspended between two states, between two choices, between presence and absence. In “Self-portrait double” (2020), the artist represents herself with two faces side by side, as if to materialize this anguish of choice, this overwhelming responsibility at the heart of existentialist philosophy. “Man is condemned to be free,” wrote Sartre [2], and this dizzying freedom is reflected in the ambiguous expressions of Tabouret’s subjects.
This uncanny strangeness emanating from her paintings is reminiscent of what Sartre called “nausea,” that brutal awareness of the absurdity of existence. Claire Tabouret’s characters all seem to have lived this fundamental experience, the moment when the veil of illusions is torn to reveal the naked truth of our condition.
But it would be a mistake to reduce Claire Tabouret’s work to a mere illustration of philosophical principles. For her painting is above all a sensory experience of rare intensity. Her colors, those fluorescent underlayers that shine through darker shades, create an almost hypnotic depth effect. It looks as if her subjects are lit from within by a spectral light, as if they were already halfway into another world.
Here is where my second reference comes into play: German Expressionist cinema. The films of F.W. Murnau or Fritz Lang have the same ability to create worlds where light becomes a full-fledged character, sculpting faces and revealing tormented souls.
In “Nosferatu” (1922), Murnau’s masterpiece, light and shadow clash in a macabre ballet that transcends simple narration [3]. In the same way, Claire Tabouret’s portraits do not merely tell a story; they plunge us into a visual experience where the interplay of shadow and light reveals hidden truths.
Look carefully at “Les Insoumis” (2013), this composition where children in costumes stare at us with a disturbing intensity. Isn’t that the same dramatic use of chiaroscuro as in Expressionist films? That way of bringing faces out of the darkness, like in that iconic scene from “M” (1931) where Peter Lorre’s face suddenly appears in the half-light [4].
German Expressionism, born from the turmoil of the post-war period, sought to express the anxieties of a traumatized society through an aesthetic of distortion and exaggeration. Distorted sets, improbable camera angles, and violent contrasts served to visually translate a deep existential malaise. Isn’t this exactly what Claire Tabouret does when she slightly distorts her figures, when she emphasizes certain features, when she applies layers of colors that seem to seep through the skin of her subjects?
In “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), Robert Wiene used painted sets with impossible perspectives to create a feeling of alienation [5]. Claire Tabouret, on her part, uses monochrome backgrounds or fleeting landscapes that seem to absorb her characters, creating that same impression of detachment from reality. Her series of embracing wrestlers irresistibly evoke the contorted bodies of Expressionist cinema, those figures that seem trapped in a nightmare choreography.
What pleases me most in Tabouret’s work is this ability to create a constant tension between the individual and the group. Her group portraits are populated by figures who, although assembled, seem deeply alone. Each face is a closed, impenetrable world, and yet all are linked by a kind of silent communion. This is what Sartre called the “look of the other,” that fundamental experience where the other reveals me to myself while reducing me to the status of an object [6].
In her series “The Team” (2016), Tabouret presents a 1930s women’s basketball team. Each player stares at the camera with the same disturbing intensity, yet each seems isolated in her own existential bubble. This is precisely the paradox that German Expressionism explored: solitude within the crowd, alienation at the very heart of modern society.
These women, these children painted by Claire Tabouret have something of the characters from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) [7]. They are both present and absent, individuals and archetypes, beings of flesh and ghosts. Their gaze pierces the screen, or the canvas, to address us directly, breaking the boundary between the artwork and the viewer.
What distinguishes Tabouret from so many contemporary artists is her rejection of easy irony and superficial social commentary. Her painting is not conceptual in the sense of illustrating a preexisting idea. Rather, it is a visceral exploration of the human condition, a dive into the depths of consciousness.
When she paints these grotesquely made-up children in the “Les Déguisements” (2015) series, she does not merely comment on lost innocence or forced precocity. She confronts us with the fundamental anxiety of the being searching behind social masks. As Sartre wrote, “I am what I am not and I am not what I am” [8], a phrase that could perfectly describe these ambiguous figures, halfway between childhood and adulthood, between authenticity and social role.
German Expressionism was obsessed with the figure of the double, the doppelgänger, that disturbing presence reminding us of our own strangeness to ourselves. Think of “The Student of Prague” (1913), where the protagonist sells his reflection to the devil [9]. Claire Tabouret constantly explores this theme, especially in her self-portraits where she depicts herself doubled, as in “Self-portrait (double)” (2020), or fragmented, as in those portraits where her face seems to dissolve under the effect of violent painterly strokes.
In her paintings on faux fur, a series presented at ICA Miami in 2023, Tabouret pushes this exploration of duality even further. The material itself becomes a metaphor for our divided nature: synthetic yet evoking the organic, soft yet resilient, familiar yet strange. These works reminded me of Fritz Lang’s words on the doppelgänger: “It is our shadow, our dark side, what we refuse to see in ourselves” [10].
Claire Tabouret’s color palette is particularly interesting. These acidic colors, these phosphorescent greens, these electric pinks underlying darker shades create a visual tension that is reminiscent of the revolutionary use of color in the later Expressionist films. In particular, I think of the use of colored filters in certain scenes of Murnau’s “Faust” (1926), where color is not simply decorative but expressive of psychological states [11].
Tabouret’s work transcends the traditional boundaries between abstraction and figuration, just as German Expressionism transcended the narrative conventions of its time. Her figures emerge from a chaos of colors and textures, as if struggling to extract themselves from a primordial magma. This tension between order and chaos, form and formlessness, lies at the very heart of the existential experience as described by Sartre.
What I see in Claire Tabouret’s portraits is the visual echo of this phrase from “Being and Nothingness”: “Man is a useless passion” [12]. Her subjects all seem inhabited by this painful awareness of their own contingency, their own fragility. And yet, they persist, they look at us, they affirm their presence despite everything.
In an artistic world overwhelmed by postmodern irony and easy cynicism, Claire Tabouret still dares to believe in the emotional power of painting. She is not afraid of authenticity, pathos, or sincerity. In this, she is paradoxically more radical than many artists who pride themselves on transgressing norms but only recycle rebellious poses that have become conventional.
The curator of her recent exhibition “Au Bois d’Amour,” Kathryn Weir, spoke of the “formation of subjectivity and the construction of identity” [13] in Tabouret’s work. This scholarly phrasing does not do justice to the visceral impact of her painting. For what Tabouret explores is not an abstract concept of identity, but the concrete, embodied experience of our being-in-the-world.
Sartre wrote that “hell is other people” [14], a phrase often misunderstood. He did not mean that others are intrinsically infernal, but rather that it is through the gaze of others that we are fixed, objectified, reduced to an essence. Claire Tabouret’s group portraits perfectly illustrate this paradox: each individual is both the observing subject and the observed object, caught in an inextricable network of gazes that define and limit them.
German expressionism was haunted by the figure of authority; think of Dr. Caligari, Mabuse, all those manipulative characters embodying oppressive power. Similarly, Tabouret’s portraits of children all seem confronted with an invisible but oppressive authority. Their defiant gazes aimed at the lens are acts of silent resistance against this authority that seeks to define and catalog them.
What I also love about Claire Tabouret is her ability to create works that resonate both with our era and with the eternal anxieties of the human condition. Her subjects are anchored in history, those archival photos she uses as a starting point, but they speak to us directly, as if time did not exist.
Isn’t that exactly what German expressionism did? Those films used Gothic, folkloric, or historical narratives to address the very contemporary anxieties of Weimar Germany. Similarly, when Tabouret paints those debutantes in 19th-century dresses, those timeless bathers, or those gold rush miners, she is actually speaking to us about ourselves, our own uncertainties, our own quests for identity.
Claire Tabouret’s work is a visual meditation on what Sartre called “bad faith” [15], that tendency we all have to lie to ourselves, to take refuge in prefab identities to avoid the anguish of freedom. Her subjects all seem caught in that crucial moment where the mask wavers, where the truth of the self threatens to break through the layers of social conventions.
Like the tormented figures of German expressionist cinema, Tabouret’s characters are both monstrous and deeply human, strange and familiar. They remind us that strangeness is not external to us; it is at the very heart of our experience of the world.
Claire Tabouret does not need conceptual artifices or theoretical discourse to justify her painting. She stands in that long tradition of artists for whom painting is not a commentary on the world, but a way of being in the world, of questioning it, of transfiguring it. In our time, when contemporary art often gets lost in sterile self-referential games, this authenticity is as refreshing as it is subversive.
The stained glass windows she is going to create for Notre-Dame de Paris will undoubtedly mark a turning point in her career. Moving from the intimate to the monumental, from the secular to the sacred, this project will allow her to inscribe her art into the very stone of history. I have no doubt that she will know how to infuse it with the same psychological intensity that is the strength of her painting.
In the meantime, immerse yourself in her canvases, let yourself be captured by those gazes that look at you through time and space. For as Sartre wrote, “what matters is not what is done to us, but what we ourselves do with what has been done to us” [16]. Claire Tabouret’s work is an invitation to this essential freedom, to this dizzying responsibility to be oneself in a world that constantly seeks to define us from the outside.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism is a Humanism, Editions Gallimard, 1946.
- Ibid.
- Eisner, Lotte H., The Haunted Screen: Expressionism and the German Cinema, Editions Ramsay, 1985.
- Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, L’Âge d’homme, 1973.
- Ibid.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, Editions Gallimard, 1943.
- Elsaesser, Thomas, Metropolis, British Film Institute, 2000.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, Editions Gallimard, 1943.
- Eisner, Lotte H., The Demonic Screen: The Influences of Max Reinhardt and Expressionism, Ramsay Editions, 1985.
- Lang, Fritz, interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
- Bouvier, Michel, Expressionism in Cinema, La Martinière, 2008.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, Gallimard Editions, 1943.
- Weir, Kathryn, exhibition catalog “Claire Tabouret: I am spacious, singing flesh”, Palazzo Cavanis, Venice, 2022.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, No Exit, Gallimard Editions, 1947.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, Gallimard Editions, 1943.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, Gallimard Editions, 1952.
