Elsa Rouy

London based artist Elsa Rouy creates images of intense psychological depth. Rouy describes her work as “a visual portrayal of abstruse emotions.” Through painting, Rouy attempts to get to the heart of her own personal experience as a woman.

Throughout her oeuvre, physical boundaries seem to dissipate: bodies split and rupture, separate skins seep and melt into one another and leaking bodily fluids drip and mingle together. For Rouy, bodies are in a constant state of ‘becoming,’ they are never static or inert, instead, they are a site of process and flux. Critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s formulation of the grotesque body is one that “is not separated from the rest of the world.” For Bakhtin, this kind of body is not “a closed, completed unit;” instead “it is unfinished, [it] outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.” Rouy’s grotesque bodies constantly extend and exceed beyond their own physical bounds. By stressing the parts of the body that represent the osmosis between the exterior, outside world and the interior, bodily world, (the breasts; the genitalia, the mouth and the eyes) Rouy creates a world in which the strict delineation between different bodies is wiped away and effaced.

Many of Rouy’s works are also tinged with feelings of extreme tenderness. Bodies fuse together in transfigured sex acts, weeping, desperate eyes look out blankly beyond the viewer and supple hands clutch at and caress other shoulders and torsos. These are human beings portrayed at their most vulnerable. Throughout Rouy’s oeuvre, figures constantly occupy situations that sit uncomfortably between that of suffering and that of pleasure. Faces could be contorted in pain, distorted and misshapen, with tongues writhing under the unspeakability of suffering or they could be thrown back in carnal rapture; succumbing to the throes of sexual abandon. All of Rouy’s works are pervaded by a certain unknowability, an abject ‘inbetweenness,’ they refuse to be constrained to any one specific meaning. Rouy’s works are provocative, they interrogate perceived notions of gender, sex and feeling and they intrude and stick themselves irreversibly onto the psychology of their viewers.