Sheila Hicks
Restless Making
Look up through an old wood and you’ll see that the canopy has assembled its own borders. Neighboring trees grow to within inches of one another, then stop. What’s left is a seam of sky running between every crown, a dark filigree across the roof of the forest like the distance strangers keep on a narrow pavement. Botanists call it crown shyness. The artist George Rouy has taken the natural phenomenon as the title of a new painting in his REPRISE series, which was on show at Hauser & Wirth earlier this year. His subjects are four naked male bodies, standing shoulder to shoulder. Nothing here keeps its distance: an outline of thigh or musculature soaks into the flesh beside it; one chest bleeds at its edge into the next torso, an arm is thrown across a shoulder in such a way that the two armpits run together like metal at welding heat. Where the heads should be, there is a black smear dragged sideways with a loaded brush. These could be sex workers holding a pose for the camera, or men pulled from sleep in a cell and hurriedly standing against a wall, every face redacted. The most legible thing left in the monochrome picture is the feet, toes drawn with a precision withheld from everything above them. The bodies run, gray pulled downward in wet vertical streaks of chrome and oil, as though the flesh were draining out through the floor. Rouy’s paintings imagine bodies that have lost the instinct trees keep, the capacity to stop just short of one another. They look anything but natural.
By all the conventional markers of art market success, Rouy is one of the most sought-after artists of his generation: his secondary market prices are dizzying, and he is one of the youngest artists in the Hauser & Wirth stable. He works from a studio in Faversham, a sleepy market town 50 miles southeast of London, not far from where he was born, and lives nearby in a converted church. It’s a long way from the churn of Camberwell and Peckham where he started out as a painter. He still shows there with Hannah Barry Gallery, whose program, run from a warren of rooms and a warehouse near Peckham Rye station, remains one of the liveliest in the city. When he does surface from Kent, it’s invariably for a singular commission, whether responding to a historical collection or taking on a subject as old as the desolation of war or the nature of God. Last year, Donatien Grau, head of contemporary programs at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, commissioned him for “Copistes” (literally, “copyists”), the Louvre’s collaboration with the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to work from Delacroix’s Scenes from the Massacres at Chios (1824). The result, The Witness (2025), keeps the sea and the pale strip of sky behind the slaughter and gives up almost everything else. The bellies and breasts of the suffering innocents pile up across the centre of the canvas, decapitated at the shoulder, assembled from hard drawn seams and thrashes of stacked brush. The bare coordinates retain their origin in one of the founding images of French Romanticism, a history painting that ranges its victims across the foreground like a frieze and indicts the terror and disease that armies leave behind them. The forms themselves, though, feel distinctly contemporary, almost machine-generated, smeared as if mid-glitch or abandoned halfway through a render, and yet they are built from oil paint and the slow labour of the arm. Flesh, in his hands, has taken on the look of a corrupted file.
George Rouy’s paintings imagine bodies that have lost the instinct trees keep, the capacity to stop just short of one another. They look anything but natural.
In March of this year, Grau invited Rouy to make new work for Pope Leo XIV’s Conciliazione 5 in Vatican City, a project founded by the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See. Its brief, in the Dicastery’s words, “invites the viewer to engage with the act of reading a painting as if it were a text, embracing the palimpsestive nature of [Rouy’s] work.” While making the large-format works, Rouy immersed himself in the 14th century apophatic text, The Cloud of Unknowing, whose anonymous author argued that one must approach God by subtracting knowledge rather than accumulating it. The work, displayed on Via della Conciliazione, drew on his fascination with the long-running argument between figurative and abstract painting, animated by the expressive mark-making that suggests the scrawl of handwritten text and the sweep of bodily gesture. “Abstraction works in time,” Rouy explains: “a big swoop holds the duration of the arm that made it, so the mark carries the body as movement, something like a dance. That’s one way a human enters a picture. The other is depiction, the figure set down as image, which is the more psychological of the two. As a painter you’re always assessing which has priority. Cy Twombly’s marks are very human in the first way, the gesture standing in for the figure. Francis Bacon, of course, has both at once.” There are two ways, then, for a body to get into a painting: it can be drawn, or it can leave its trace. Rouy wants the second to do the work of the first.
Rouy shoulders the burdens of art history while reminding his growing audiences that he is a young millennial, fascinated by the relentless saturation of digital imagery in his own time, and the two commitments meet on the surface of every canvas. On the one hand, he is the latest in a long line of painters of flesh, the substance Willem de Kooning said oil paint was invented for, and he handles it with the appetite Rubens or Soutine brought to a side of beef. On the other, is what Rouy does to that inheritance, and it is here that his work feels like it is grappling with our own moment: his faces, often massed in group portraits, surface from the canvas the way faces now reach us, thumbed past at speed and reposted until the likeness starts to slip. In this way, Rouy inherits a postwar problem: the fate of a likeness once it has been photographed, printed, and printed again. Some of his recent canvases recall Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings of the 1960s, where a face lifted from a family album or a black-and-white newspaper is dragged out of focus while the paint is still wet, so that the sitter emerges into our field of view already receding. As a child, Rouy hung a reproduction of Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis (1963) on his wall, one of the first canvases in which the Pop artist printed a figure twice on a single ground, so that the singer’s likeness stutters against the silver as though caught between two frames. Bacon, the painter to whom Rouy is compared above all else, worked from a studio floor at Reece Mews that was ankle-deep in torn reproductions, Velázquez alongside Muybridge and the boxing photographs cut from the sports pages.
(Read the full profile in Issue 11)
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