GEORGE ROUY

Amongst the themes Rouy explores in these new works is the idea of ‘carrying;’ how we are carried into life and eventually carried out of life. The works are considering collective care, how we care for each other from birth until death; how our lives are a sequence of experiences of balance and unease; feelings of being carried, or feeling the opposite—being dropped. What happens to the mass of individuals placed into surrounding space.

‘The bleed’ is a term Rouy uses in relation to the surrounds of the figures; the relationship between figure and void and how those two realms interact in terms of the surface of the paintings: a physical seeping, blending and merging. ‘The surrounds’ refers to the place where the flesh and inner parts of the body meet its surrounding conditions—temperature, heat, etc.

Articulating a vocabulary of figurative painting which is as distinctive as it is visceral, Rouy’s paintings are defined by contradictions—stasis and flow, precision and indeterminacy—in doing so he undermines the body as a fixed unit, proposing instead a body that constantly imagines and defines itself through its relationship with itself, with others, and with the world at large.