Figurative, Claire TABOURET's work, in layers and transparencies, which combines solids, thicknesses, and fluidities, reveals a shifting reality. The artist works based on photographs, drawing upon her personal archives as much as anonymous clichés harvested during her research, capturing figures frozen in an indefinable space-time, in order to advance a new reading of their presences and their appearances. In the series Flood Houses that introduced her to the public, there is no sign of human presence, just a disquieting mass of abandoned habitats being overtaken by water. Then, in the Migrants series, it is also in this stagnant posture that we observe the embarkations of migrants that Claire TABOURET paints at a stop, the motor cut and revealed above black and dormant water. Certain faces are turned toward the viewer, in a frank but hermetic attitude, seeming to send us back to our own gaze and questioning the pertinence of it. Following these series more or less directly and consciously inspired by actual happenings, the work of Claire TABOURET turned more radically towards the figuration of people, moving away from places haunted by their invisible presence, to representing in large group portraits children and adolescents. Inhabited by certain characters, the need to not let them go, to identify them more precisely, pushed the artist to rework them individually, isolating them in small format works or acrylic on paper, or in giving them corporality in ceramic busts. In the work of Claire TABOURET, the portrait, whether it is of a group or an individual, is a living genre, to the point where it becomes poisonous, vindictive, a protest. The characters are extracted from their environments, contexts, and bearings, and propelled to the heart of a pictorial space that is enigmatic, somber, and embarrassing. Intimacy is the fundamental dynamic of the approach of Claire TABOURET. The viewer perceives it, senses it, even with discomfort at times, in the stubborn faces of her characters, which suggest a strong interior life. The artist also makes us enter in the material itself of her scenes captured and reformulated. Through the canvases, she deploys a universe filled with histories, memories, and possible projections. The intimate is the existential arc that, from inside to outside, between identity and otherness, connects all her figures, whether they be painted, drawn, or sculpted, to the gazes which fall upon them.