Makeup (Blue Earrings)

Claire Tabouret’s dream-like paintings seem conjured from another world. Makeup (Blue Earrings) (2017) is a portrait of a fierce young woman dressed in a striped blouse, face smeared with lipstick. Although Tabouret exploits the grammar of portraiture, this is far from a conventional portrait; the figure stares insolently to the side and refuses to make eye contact with the viewer. In doing so, Makeup (Blue Earrings) belies easy classification and instead suggests an inherent powerplay in which the subject refuses to be comprehended. Interested in the ways in which one’s identity can metamorphose and reform, Tabouret chooses to make adolescents her subjects: an age-group caught in the process of becoming. To find faces, Tabouret scours the internet and her own large collection of photographs creating compositions that play with the understanding of portraiture. The loose, luminescent brushwork speaks to this alteration, achieved in part through Tabouret’s highly stylised technique of priming the canvas with a layer of fluorescent paint and the Day-Glo colours she often applies to her subject’s faces. ‘These paintings,’ explains Tabouret, ‘are painted in two steps. First I paint a portrait of a child—nice and tidy. Then I cover it with makeup as one of a child’s first primitive gesture related to painting. The makeup is about painting, but also about wearing a mask’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in Flaunt, 20 September 2016).

Tabouret’s paintings rarely function as fixed likenesses, but rather fluctuating entities which evolve in time. Meaning for Tabouret is not determined solely by her hand but rather by the ever-shifting interaction between painter, painting, and viewer. ‘There is, of course, a physical transformation that happens on the canvas, but I’m also thinking about questioning structures and identities within my work. I’m trying to subvert the expectations of the viewer, to make something that’s a little bit confrontational,’ she has explained. ‘And the transformation of the painting doesn’t end with me, because it’s always evolving in the eyes of the viewer. It’s changing every day, with every person’ (C. Tabouret, quoted in K. Donoghue, ‘Claire Tabouret Explores Ritual, Transformation, and Change’, Whitewall, 25 April 2022). Born in Pertuis, France and now based in Los Angeles, Tabouret has gained critical acclaim over the last ten years for her incandescent, and often large, paintings which today are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others; her exhibition I am spacious, singing flesh is currently on view in conjunction with the 59th Venice Biennale. Ambiguity is key to her compositions which often suggest a psychological tension between the individual and larger society. Indeed, the teenager in Makeup (Blue Earrings) appears preoccupied with some drama occurring just out of frame. Vivid and radiant, the not-quite portrait depicts a range of emotions, suggesting that  that our lives, longings, and definitions are always in flux.