With Claire Tabouret, there is a kind of breath running through her work. A movement of expansion and withdrawal, a back-and-forth between recognisable landscapes and more deeply buried territories that she ceaselessly explores. Bathed in a light that seems to well up from a place deeper than the canvas, her figures carry a contained tension, a vibrant fragility, as if each image were oscillating between appearance and disappearance.

A major retrospective at the Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands, a notable presence at the Crocker Art Museum, and, in France, the commission for new stained-glass windows for Notre-Dame de Paris have brought her greater prominence. Yet, in her Los Angeles studio, which Claire Tabouret describes as ‘a living organism that fills and empties’, her artistic process remains unchanged. She works in layers, through successive removals, accumulating images and silences before letting the paint take its course.

In a Single Breath

At the Grand Palais, with ‘In a Single Breath’, she unveiled the monumental models of the six stained-glass windows intended for the south aisle of Notre-Dame, created in collaboration with the Simon-Marq studio. Extended due to high visitor numbers, the exhibition offered a glimpse into the creative process: assembled fragments, nearly seven metres high per bay, with the light still taking shape. More than a finished result, it was a work in progress.

The monotype emerged as her preferred technique: ink applied to transparent Plexiglas, the image conceived in reverse, printed onto thick paper. A method that combines rigour with the unexpected. Once the image has been transferred, there is little room for correction. The gesture must be precise. In this inversion, the stained-glass window is already taking shape, a light conceived even before it passes through the glass.

The theme of Pentecost permeates the entire body of work. ‘We live in such a divided, chaotic, frightening world…’, she confides. Her figures seek a possible harmony, a shared breath capable of transcending differences. Even before they were installed, the models revealed that rare moment when a personal exploration becomes part of a monument’s history.

A return to figurative art

This monumentality stems from a reverse movement: withdrawal. Claire Tabouret speaks of an ‘internal isolation from time’ which, paradoxically, led her towards the landscape. Not descriptive horizons, but states of being. For her, the process precedes the discourse. ‘The images come first; I understand them afterwards,’ she says. Painting becomes a space for deciphering, almost a place of intimate trial.

On synthetic faux fur, the material is absorbed as if into skin, imposing an irreversible gesture. The purples vibrate, the yellows blaze, the translucent layers accumulate in almost geological strata. For the first time, the artist explicitly claims her artistic lineage, Morandi, Cézanne, not to quote them, but to build upon their work. ‘Adding a layer to a story that is being written over time,’ she says.

Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she belongs to a generation that has reclaimed figurative painting without nostalgia. Her early series already explored collective vulnerability. In her work, the figure is never static; it always seems to be in the process of becoming. The retrospective ‘Weaving Waters, Weaving Gestures’ at the Museum Voorlinden showcases the breadth of her practice, encompassing canvas, faux fur, Plexiglas, bronze and ceramics. It reveals the profound coherence of her work—a body of work that is at once classical and romantic, sombre and luminous, permeated by questions of identity and memory.

The growing prominence of women

From one room to the next, the figures seem to migrate from one medium to another, just as one changes states. Whether painted, moulded or printed, they retain the same inner resonance. Water, a recurring motif, acts as a metaphor for transition and transformation, whilst the gesture, repeated and shifted, weaves a tangible continuity between eras and media.

At the Crocker Art Museum, in ‘Making Moves: A Collection of Feminisms’, her work engages in dialogue with that of artists who have explored the female experience, including Frida Kahlo, within a multifaceted history of representations.

What the Tabouret year reveals goes beyond an individual trajectory. It speaks to an artistic moment: the assertive return of figurative painting to major institutions, the increased prominence of women artists in heritage commissions, and the fluid exchange between Europe and the United States. The commission for the stained-glass windows at Notre-Dame is not merely a personal milestone; it marks the integration of a contemporary pictorial language into a monument steeped in history. Where one might have expected a spectacular gesture, Claire Tabouret offers a subtle continuity, with light treated as an intrinsic material rather than a mere effect.

From her Californian studio to the stained-glass windows of Notre-Dame, from interior landscapes to the galleries of international museums, Claire Tabouret shifts scale without losing her centre. And if 2026 marks a turning point, it is not so much due to a succession of events as to the new breadth of a creative impulse that was already there, now on a global scale.

Article written by Désirée de Lamarzelle, featured in issue 15 of Oniriq Magazine

Translated by Bethszabee Garner