London based artist Elsa Rouy, creates images of intense psychological depth
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.
