Elsa Rouy: A Screaming Object

Guts Gallery is incredibly excited to present A Screaming Object; a solo presentation of ambitious, boundary-pushing new work by London-based artist Elsa Rouy.

A Screaming Object features Rouy’s largest and boldest work to date: a 7.5 metre long frieze made up of five large-scale canvases depicting one continuous scene. In this grand, imposing new work, Rouy continues to explore and navigate the unsettling boundary between hellish, visceral brutality and soft, tender beauty. The result is a complicated, transgressive and labyrinthine emotional landscape in which the repressed, troubling elements of the human subconscious are explored.

There is a pervasive and palpable sense of tension in Rouy’s new work. Throughout the exhibition, ghostly visages are twisted into distorted expressions that occupy an uneasy, unknowable realm between orgasmic pleasure and abject pain. In the vast, eponymous central work, a probing finger can be seen plunging into a bleeding open wound in a moment of masochistic, sexually charged self-mutilation. Elsewhere, two figures are captured engaging in an amorous embrace. Their visages have been effaced; suggesting the total annihilation of the self in the thrall of sexual communion. However, this is not a private tryst, it is watched jealously by self-conscious figures whose eyes burn with a bitter sense of yearning. 

Throughout the piece, the silky, lustrous skin of Rouy’s fragmentary forms is illuminated against a dark, brooding backdrop of bruise-like, nebulous colour. At the same time, a harsh, central dividing line intersects the entire painting and transforms the background into a distorted facsimile of a theatre stage. In the centre of the work, the backdrop is punctuated with spectral clothes that hang eerily from a washing line; utterly frozen in the uncanny stillness of the painting’s stifling atmosphere. These phantom-like garments are imbued with a strange psychosexual power as they transform into emblems of fetishistic desire and situate the scene uncomfortably within the realm of the domestic.

Alongside the vast, central work, Rouy presents three smaller, more intimate paintings which each depict a singular figure. Much like the larger work, these figures are similarly distorted and fragmentary, but instead of suffering the changes wrought by others’ violent actions, these bodies are undergoing a much more solitary, lonely transfiguration. They twist and contort themselves into warped, uncomfortable forms; each of them appearing to be burdened by their overgrown, disproportionate limbs. Two of these figures are half-shrouded in a dusty, black miasmatic vapour that creeps in ominously from the corners of each canvas, while the other sits strikingly against a wash of lurid, maddening yellow: the colour of sickly-sweet rot.

Throughout A Screaming Object, Rouy alternates between a variety of painting techniques to capture the volatile and unstable nature of the human body. At points, Rouy’s forms are depicted in soft, sumptuous detail which hearkens back to the style of classical nudes. This ‘softness’ is immediately troubled as Rouy creates scratched out, obliterated surfaces to cause separate bodies to blend together in a visceral representation of frenzied, kinetic motion. At other points, Rouy’s brushstrokes are imbued with a more gestural, expressionistic feel; leaving only ghostly suggestions of knee caps, elbow joints and desperate clasping hands.

A Screaming Object is accompanied by an original score composed by Oscar Defriez. This soundtrack provides an all-encompassing, unsettling sensory experience and serves to accent the harrowing drama of the colossal central painting.

Words by Jamie Hope