(i) Les Masques (Tess)(ii) Fleur du désert jaune

Claire Tabouret’s canvases thrum with an enigmatic yet formidable strength. The French-born, Los Angeles-based artist creates expressive, evocative imagery often drawn from snapshots and historical photographs. She often begins by priming her canvases with a layer of fluorescent paint, which suffuses the image with a luminous glow; painted in 2015, Fleur du désert jaune and Les Masques (Tess) appear to burn from within. The diptych, which consists of a masked woman and a blurred bouquet, is part of the artist’s larger consideration of disguised and hidden identities; Tabouret often cloaks her figures behind veils of painterly masks. Her paintings embrace ambiguity, and Tabouret believes that flux is inherent to the medium itself: ‘Paintings are not dead objects,’ she has noted. ‘[They] actually evolve—the way you look at it—because you’re going to change … It can be this dialogue that teaches you things your whole life. A good painting for me should be that’ (C. Tabouret quoted in J. Palumbo, ‘Claire Tabouret’s New Self-Portraits Capture the Fragility of Solitude’, Artsy, 26 October 2020). Indeed, uncertainty is central to Tabouret’s visual rhetoric, and rarely does her work adhere to a prescribed understanding. Fleur du désert jaune and Les Masques (Tess) radiate danger, immorality, depravity, but also daring and fortitude. Tabouret’s work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, among others.