1 / 3
Photo 1/3 du lotPhoto 2/3 du lotPhoto 3/3 du lot
Premium Artcurial

5 - Claire TABOURET Untitled - 2014 Charcoal, pastel and collage…
See original version (French)

Estimate €100,000 - €150,000
Sale commission
Description
Claire TABOURET Untitled - 2014 Charcoal, pastel and collages of fabric and gauze on paper Signed and dated 183 x 99.5 cm Charcoal drawings, pastel and fabric collages on paper; signed and dated 72.04 x 39.17 in. Provenance: Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris Acquired directly from the latter by the current owner "The children I represent are neither vulnerable nor fragile, but rather seem determined. They're mostly dressed up as rabbits, chickens, fairies...but from my point of view, they're mostly dressed up as children." Claire Tabouret, Portrait by Isabelle Giovacchini, in Arts Magazine, January 2014 FR Claire Tabouret works with photographs, both personal archives and anonymous snapshots collected in the course of her research. She takes hold of figures frozen in an indefinable space-time, to put forward a new reading of their presence and appearance. Like ghosts, the children seem to emerge from buried memories and stories that the artist reactivates and rewrites. She constructs a new reality for them: complex, disturbing, hypnotic. Alone or presented in groups, they have literally colonised her pictorial universe. Between presence and absence, the characters are extracted from their environments, their contexts and their points of reference. They are propelled into the heart of the pictorial space: enigmatic, dark and embarrassing. The artist explores the idea of passages through the elaboration of a fragile realm, held in balance by a subtle combination of paradoxes: past-present, reality-fiction, clairvoyance-blindness, light-darkness. Inside, children pose and prowl... Their gazes are cold, lucid, almost disembodied... By engaging in a game of masks, the artist cultivates the ambiguity of gender in order to abolish the obvious, stereotypes and conformation. Her characters - princes, witches, rabbits, deer, ghosts - seek each other out and seek us out with their eyes. To define her figures, the artist has chosen the word prosôpon, a childish-sounding term from ancient Greek that designates both the face and the mask, but also the presence, appearance or arrival of a person. In this light-space, the presences observe us gravely and silently, to the point of destabilising us. They are as if enclosed in the painting, which can then be understood as a shelter from which they in turn stare back at us. By accentuating the intensity of her inner gazes, Claire Tabouret draws us into the very fabric of scenes that have been captured and reformulated. Over the course of her canvases, she unfolds a universe full of stories, memories and possible projections. Julie Crenn on the occasion of the Prosôpon exhibition, Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris 2013 This work is part of a body of work in which Claire Tabouret depicts groups of children (to be compared with the painting Les Insoumis in the Pinault collection): "Although they are all in the same situation and form a block, none of the characters is looking at the other and they are all looking where they are not. It's just as much Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre' as Sartre's 'L'enfer, c'est les autres'." Tabouret uses expressive material and frontal compositions that reinforce the psychological intensity of the portraits. It is a sensitive reflection on the construction of identity and collective memory, while renewing the tradition of contemporary portraiture. EN Claire Tabouret works from photographs, both personal archives and anonymous snapshots collected in the course of her research. She takes hold of figures frozen in an indefinable space-time, to put forward a new reading of their presence and appearance. Like ghosts, the children seem to emerge from buried memories and stories that the artist reactivates and rewrites. She constructs a new reality for them: complex, disturbing, hypnotic. Alone or presented in groups, they have literally colonised her pictorial universe. Between presence and absence, the characters are extracted from their environments, their contexts and their points of reference. They are thus propelled to the heart of the pictorial space: enigmatic, dark and embarrassing. The artist explores the idea of passages through the elaboration of a fragile realm, held in balance by a subtle combination of paradoxes: past-present, reality-fiction, clairvoyance-blindness, light-darkness. Inside, children pose and prowl... Their gazes are cold, lucid, almost disembodied... By engaging in a game of masks, the artist cultivates the ambiguity of gender in order to abolish the obvious, stereotypes and conformation. Her characters - princes, witches, rabbits, deer, ghosts - seek each other out and seek us out with their eyes. To define her figures, the artist has chosen the word prosôpon, a childish-sounding term from ancient Greek that designates both the face and the mask, but also the presence, appearance or arrival of a person. In this light-space, the presences observe us gravely and silently, to the point of destabilising us. They are as if enclosed in the painting, which can then be understood as a shelter from which they in turn stare back at us. By accentuating the intensity of the inner gaze, Claire Tabouret draws us into the very fabric of scenes that have been captured and reformulated. Over the course of her canvases, she unfolds a world full of stories, memories and possible projections. Julie Crenn on the occasion of the exhibition Prosôpon, Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris 2013 This work is part of a body of work in which Claire Tabouret depicts groups of children (similar to the painting *Les Insoumis* from the Pinault Collection): "Although they are all in the same situation and stand united, none of the figures looks at the others, and they all gaze in a direction where they are not. It is as much Rimbaud's 'I is another' as it is Sartre's 'Hell is other people.'" Tabouret uses expressive materials and frontal compositions that heighten the psychological intensity of the portraits. It is a sensitive reflection on the construction of identity and collective memory, while renewing the tradition of the contemporary portrait. Claire TABOURET
See original version (French)
Auto-translation. Refer to original language for legal validity.
About the sale Twenty One Contemporary
Auction location
Auction time 06/04/2026 at 5:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
You may also like