George Rouy’s dynamic and signature use of the human figure, vexed with desire, alienation and crisis, speaks to the extremities of our time, resulting in portraits of identity in a globalized and technologically driven 21st Century. Within the elusive group scene ‘Stains on the Scenery’ (2024), certain elements of the body are distorted, highlighted or emphasized, signaling altered psychological states. Forging a vocabulary of figurative painting, which is as distinctive as it is visceral, his paintings are defined by contradictions—statis and flow, precision and indeterminacy—all in order to undermine the body as a fixed unit, exposing the hybridity of technology, sexuality and gender.

In this new work, Rouy extracts and reappropriates elements from photography and found imagery, bleeding figures into each other and their surroundings, to create abstractions far removed from the original source whilst retaining a distorted familiarity. Within the square composition of the work lies a gradual disintegration of the figure and form, charged with flashes of pigment and passages of abstraction. Rouy’s work presents us with a new language confronting the human body with bold and subversive energy, transformation and flux.

_{Portrait: George Rouy, 2024 © George Rouy. Courtesy the artist, Hannah Barry Gallery and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Kemka Ajoku}