George Rouy “Endless Song”

Nicola Vassell Gallery

This event has ended.

“George Rouy’s figurative practice is an exercise in introspection—an attempt at mapping the turmoil of the human experience. With densely-textured paint, dynamic abstraction, and vibrant color, his artworks bring into focus the corporeal involucrum mediating our interactions with the outer world, only to unveil what’s happening deep within us, in spaces that eyes can’t reach and hands can’t feel.

On view through October 21, Endless Song, Rouy’s latest solo exhibition, feels like a testament to the evolution of his practice. In this new series of immersive paintings, the artist presents viewers with a collection of group scenes modeled off his love of the Old Masters and abstract expressionism. At once violent and ethereal, his canvases dissect the physicality of the body to expose the tangled inner workings of our time on Earth. To mark the opening of the showcase, Rouy takes stock of his artistic growth thus far, reflecting on the “universal” message subtly plastered onto his bold paintings.”
- Gilda Bruno, Document Journal

Since breaking into the art scene after graduating from London’s Camberwell College of Arts in 2015, Rouy has taken an almost totemic approach to his painterly study of the human form. Although his aesthetic forefathers have shifted from Fernando Botero to Albert Oehlen in the past eight years, the artist retains a faith in the double-edged sword of accessibility and opacity that depicting the body affords him. The glitchy, delirious, and sometimes claustrophobic polyphony of paintings that make up “Endless Song,” his solo show on view at New York’s Nicola Vassell Gallery, marks an exciting new chapter in Rouy’s anatomic dissertation. To honor its opening, CULTURED sat down with the London-based painter to discuss his process.

Rouy: “This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the face within the paintings, and how the presence of a painting changes when you remove or abstract a face. I was really battling with it for a while; something felt off. It took a lot of time for me to gain confidence and have the paintings focus just on the body. With that, it becomes even less anchored. I always thought you needed these anchor points in a figurative painting—a face, hands… I’ll always keep my practice in the realm of figuration [though] because I think psychologically the work is best when it has that essence of the body. Once you go fully abstract, how do you go back? It’s like a K-hole of abstraction.”
- Ella Martin-Gachot, Cultured