Why Elsa Rouy’s New Exhibition ‘A Screaming Object’ Is Beautifully Brutal
‘I think brutality is always born out of a certain tenderness’ says London-based artist Elsa Rouy over a Zoom call as we discuss her new exhibition A Screaming Object at GUTS Gallery in London. Creating work deeply rooted in the push and pull relationship between beauty and brutality, Rouy is no doubt a skilled master at weaving her personal experiences and identity into her craft, serving as a testament to the idea that beauty and brutality are not opposites but rather interconnected elements of our shared human experience.
Visceral is the first word that comes to mind as I peruse Rouy's work, which depicts the human body in various distortions - whether that be ghostly visages, acts of self-mutulation, or even violence at the hands of others. Rouy’s unique talent as a painter is hidden in the thin line she treads between the surreal and real - the juxtaposition between these two extremes, like the subject matter of the exhibition, naturally conjures up a slight discomfort for any viewer who decides to sit longer than a few seconds with the work. Alas, this is no critique; that discomfort is intrinsic to Rouy’s inspiration, as a painter but as a fellow human being. ‘I’ve experienced forms of emotional disturbance throughout my life and so [this show is about] finding the tenderness within it and getting myself to places where I feel some sort of connection to it’. In mining her own rolodex of discomfort, a facet of life which Rouy self-admits she has a fondness for, she tells me, ‘I’m trying to seek acceptance of horrible things, and then doing that in probably a really weird way rather than actually just accepting them.’
Beyond her own experiences, Rouy’s broader identity as a woman plays a vital role in this show. ‘You know, when you see depictions of women or girls it never really feels like it truly fits how I perceive myself’, Rouy notes. ‘They’re not very tender and the scale of emotion we’re all capable of lacks’. But the examination of her own identity as a woman does not manifest beyond the abstract ideas, she clarifies, ‘the bodies that I paint are’, she pauses, ‘they’re very general, they’re complete generalists. I want them to be anyone or anything because - although they’re a very specific body, and sometimes they’re quite hard and quite harsh bodies - they can be kind of anyone or anything. They may sometimes appear female but it’s all up to the mind of the viewer’.
The ambiguity of Rouy’s bodies works in tandem with her dream-like surrealist style, a label which Rouy has only recently welcomed, by, as she says, ‘using the body and the space in the paintings to create [the surreal]’. Rouy’s choice of surrealism allows her the ability of, ‘questioning the existential, the possibilities of what could be if you take the person out of the physical world’, she tells me.
In studying Rouy’s work, what stands out to me the most is her technical prowess and deft understanding of colour, both of which are vital in eradicating any traces of our material world. You only have to look at the way Rouy depicts hair and skin on her subjects' bodies, to know what I'm talking about. ‘They’re kind of completely perfect and shiny. I’ve intentionally made their hair very shiny and luscious, but what’s happening in the background is brutality. Using this surreal element of the perfect body, large boobs and shiny skin against a harsh scenario is the only way I’ve been able to do this’, Rouy confirms. A harsh but honest critique of Rouy’s work could be made about the simplicity present in her backgrounds. Alas, look closer and in actuality, you’ll find yourself in complex compositions that illustrate the artist’s innate understanding of colour as a communicative power for her artistry. In opting to foreground the flawless uniformity of her bodies against broken strokes of bruise-like purples, pools of blood-red that bleed into a panache green, or a sterile-white clouded by a dark grey, Rouy spotlights a skillfulness in translating abstraction into a tangible visual landscape, unbounded by the constraints of reality she refuses to follow.
Keen to know more, I ask Rouy where her inspiration for her colour language originates from. ‘That one scene in Paris, Texas where Nastassja Kinski’s character is wearing a fuschia pink mohair jumper, stuck in my head because I just love that shade of pink’, Rouy admits. ‘When scenes like that stick in my head that’s when I take inspiration from them’. After a momentary lag on our Zoom call, Rouy excitedly exclaims, ‘Oh! I always mention it but Don’t Look Now is another reference of mine. It’s a really basic colour palette, they have red in every single scene… even someone’s daughter dies in a red raincoat. It’s that idea of using colour or repetitive imagery as foreshadowing or an omen that I love’
Rouy’s impressive technical skills the magnum opus of this exhibition: a 7.5 metre frieze, which is composed of five large scale paintings. At one end of the frieze is a couple joining together in a celebration of sexual communion, but this private act of intimacy disrupted by the presence of a jealous onlooker, and the other end a depiction of a probing finger deeply plunging into an acephalous body. Each subject of Rouy’s world undergoes transfiguration of some kind, which ultimately culminates in, as Rouy herself puts it ‘a theatrical rendition of an emotional landscape’.
Ultimately, A Screaming Object builds a surrealist landscape to emphasise an often forgotten truth in our shared emotional experience: even within glaring brutality there can exist pockets of tenderness.
A Screaming Object is on display at GUTS Gallery until 21 December.