The story of the restoration of Notre-Dame begins with a fire, since Claire Tabouret is well aware.
The officials in France have chosen it, a Frenchman who, in the last 10 years, has called Los Angeles Home, to help bring his 900 million resurrection project to the finish line. It will create windows in different southern bays.
And while Tabouret saw the most destructive fires in the history of Los Angeles to burn his adoptive city, parallels have become inevitable.
Everything “begins with a fire, that a conversation begins,” he said – a conversation on how to “transform this destruction into a new rebirth, new life”.
The small piece of the Notre-Dame rebirth to which Tabouret, 43, is contributing is a unique opportunity over time: add a contemporary touch to a cathedral of almost 1,000 years.
The only reason why Tabouret is to have this possibility is because a fire swallowed the roof and spire of the cathedral in 2019. Laurent Ulrich, archbishop of Paris, then raised the idea of installing new windows and, on a visit to Construction site 2023, President Emmanuel Macron of France signed.
The French Ministry of Culture, he said, would have run a competition for a year to choose the artist who would have designed them. The windows, the ministry said, would have filled six of the seven chapels on the side of the nave, joining a figurative window in one of the chapels that would remain. The officials said that the commission was not to replace everything that had been lost, but to give the cathedral a flavor of the contemporary gesture that had been promised in the wake of the fire.
The conservationists have housed rumors, in part because the windows have been replaced-from renewal of the nineteenth century orchestrated by Eugène Emmanuel viollet-le-duc-and survived fire. (Other windows in the cathedral, including famous films, remain intact.)
“I never applied for the first competitions,” Tabouret said in an interview. “And I think that when I saw it, I was like ‘ok, if I try once in my life to request something, this should be this. Because there is nothing bigger, more historical or incredible. “
Tabouret grew up in the south of France and also knew as a child who wanted to become a painter. Has nourished his interest with books full of 19th century landscapes. And in the period in which he turned 18, he took the train to Paris, where he was admitted to the venerated école des Beaux-Arts.
He visited New York as an exchange student at Cooper Union before returning to Paris, where he modeled art lessons, worked as a telemarketer and waited for the tables to remain afloat. One day in 2013, the businessman and the French collector François Pinault noticed one of his paintings, he said. He bought all his work on the show. “The morning after my life it was different,” he said.
Just over a year later, he moved to Los Angeles, where he quickly discovered one of the main pendants of the city: “That feeling that you can be in a city, but also very lonely,” he said.
Since then, most of his work has been filled with figures: sometimes miners, sometimes wrestlers, sometimes children (who are sometimes in a group and sometimes they make up), sometimes young women and sometimes. His figures are often full of “body language” and “internal feelings”, as he said, and have been exhibited in Paris, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo and elsewhere. A painting of young debutants in blue clothes sold at auction for $ 870,000 in 2021, and many other works have also sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Claire has always taken her personal life while creating her paintings. But they transcend his personal narrative, “said Davada Nemeroff, owner of Night Gallery in Los Angeles, who will host an exhibition of the new work by Tabouret (” Moonlight Shadow “) from February 15th to March 29.” We can all see each other in the paintings, that I think it is the reason why they are so powerful and also the reason why I think it is a great candidate to make the Notre-Dame project. “
Tabouret, whose dark sweater and jeans have been splashed with paint on a day of the recent week, knows that some rigidly oppose his new job to replace loved windows.
But he considers himself a heart researcher. And she knows the story of Notre-Dame. Note that it was built long before the nineteenth century, when the last renewal occurred (which the conservationists embraced). And also at its foundation hundreds of years earlier, a church on the site had been fucked on purpose so that its stones could be used to build something better.
“The idea of using and reusing and transforming is part of the history of this building,” he said. “Every renewal changes what was before. So it would be a bit strange to freeze it in time. “
“We have to trust our art,” he added, “in the same way every century before trusting our artists”.
A committee that manages the Tabouret competition in the end won has given the last eight contenders a specific assignment with specific parameters: painting Pentecost. Every large window, with its numerous panels, must represent a phrase of the Bible; Follow the story; Foul figurative work; When considering the colors, respect the beautiful neutral white light; Whatever you do should be easily understood.
In the Los Angeles study of Tabouret, its vibrant sketches of each of the six windows were displayed on the wall and on the floor. They were accompanied by pieces that enlarged some of the human faces that offered a natural and more detailed look at how the work will eventually appear inside the cathedral.
He had done his work in plexiglass. And then, using a print, Tabouret created the paper prints of each design. The ink is displayed differently on each print, offering insights on colors, plot and shadows. “There is an element of unpredictability and surprise,” he said. “How to play between what you can actually control and what you can’t.”
One of the six windows he had designed depicts “Languages of Fire”, said Tabouret. This is the reason why officials have chosen Pentecost and the steps they made, he said. They wanted to tie the fire to the fire that forced the restoration.
In this, Tabouret took a moment to consider fires in Los Angeles who burned not far from his study and the life he created here for herself and his family.
On the other side of the study, a great painting by a group of children leaned against the wall. Tabouret had recently pulled him out of the storage and had decided to spray it with blue-gray liquid liquid acrylic paint, without knowing why. He had also added a blanket on children.
Now, he said, the strips created by the spray suddenly looked at her as Ash. The blanket looked like a form of protection. “Maybe not much coincidence,” he said.
“What is truly shattered for everyone in Los Angeles is that we felt safe and certain,” he complained. “It is so densely populated here, we thought the fire could never come to us.”