Installation view, George Rouy: Endless Song, 2023. Photo credit: Lance Brewer.
The paintings of the U.K.-based artist George Rouy employ a unique blend of realistic figuration, gesture, movement, color, and abstraction that yields singular compositions with an unmissable signature—a product of interest in the movements of dancers, and Sharon Eyal’s dance company, in particular. In “Endless Song” at Nicola Vassell, Rouy debuts a suite of new paintings, his subjects rendered on large-scale canvases where their bodies seem caught in situ. Accented by energetic flashes of color and blurred brushstrokes that suggest both motion and emotion, these imagined spaces filled with moving bodies hold the viewer’s attention through a balance of contrasts that bring to mind the practices of Renaissance portraiture, the avant-garde, and the suggestion of distorted photographs.
