GEORGE ROUY: THE BLEED, PART I

George Rouy’s debut solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, ‘The Bleed, Part I,’ presents a new body of work continuing his inquiry into collective mass, multiplicity and movement.

October 7 – December 21, 2024

‘The bleed’ is an expression used by Rouy to pertain to the relationship between figure and void—or ‘the surrounds’, as termed by the artist—and how those two realms interact and manifest on the surface of his paintings, resulting in a physical seeping, blending and merging.

‘The surrounds’ refers to the zone where flesh and inner parts of the body meet their surrounding conditions—from intensive properties of temperature, density and speed to extensive forms of mass, volume and entropy. The paintings on view not only reflect the tension present between figures and their surrounds but also the tensions and harmonies among individuals or a group.

In these new works, abstraction is used as a tool of pursuing a sensation of distortion. The gestural sections are used not as abstract marks per se but as a series of signals to breakages in the figures, and to control the pace of looking at the picture. The works offer an uncanny familiarity, with each composition invoking forms and feelings born as much from the artist’s mind as they are a phantasmagoria, lost of reference and time.

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.