Elsa Rouy

Elsa Rouy is an artist from Sittingbourne, Kent who now lives and works in London; she is currently completing her BA Hons in Painting at Camberwell College of the Arts. Rouy creates artwork that founded in a female gaze on sex, its anxiety, and its pleasure: she focuses on moments at the intersection of intimacy and sexuality, interested in the dialogue between subject and surrounding. She plays with depictions of female and male genitalia, making paintings of figures with their sexual organs revealed and using genitalia as a way to navigate anxieties that come with having, and being conscious of, a body. 

The paintings also explore themes of emotional pretense and trepidation between people, highlighted through sexual intercourse. Her work focuses on bodily fluids such as semen, milk, urine, sweat, and saliva, using this imagery to highlight our paradoxical relationship to sex and its products – we find it at once repulsive and alluring. In addition to this, these fluids probe the link between pleasure, death, and reproduction. 

Elsa’s main aim is to include the viewer as a voyeuristic counterpart within an erotic scene that feels personal rather than pornographic. Ensnaring the viewer with an initial feeling of comfort, intrigue, and excitement, then permeating this security with a subconscious reaction of repulsion and uneasiness.