The figures in the works of George Rouy (English, born in 1994) experience a perpetual transformation, being recognizable as human bodies yet blending easily into abstraction. Knowing that the human figure was the center of attention in Western art history throughout the centuries, Rouy brings this subject brilliantly into contemporary art and gives it a new manifestation using 21st-century possibilities in conducting his research.

Inspired by postwar gestural abstraction, but also by the dynamics of earlier figurative painting, such as Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Rouy explores forms of a human body in flux in order to try to get closer to what constitutes a human. According to Rouy, his work is entirely about the human essence, and all good and bad things that come with it.

Rouy’s source of imagery has been the Internet, where the artist would scour all kinds of images that interest him, then collage and Photoshop them, and distort them again, so that the image that ­finally emerges seems vaguely familiar to us and can become the basis of a painting.

Silent Retreat (2023) is a great example of Rouy’s hazy, dreamlike quality that’s characteristic of his work, in which painterly disruption of depicted bodies creates tension and mystery. The five nude female figures rendered in rich hues of brown and red, are placed against a gray and blue abstract background, giving all the attention to these intense colors and visible brushstrokes. The combination of clear vertical and horizontal brushstrokes, with paint fields where the artist’s hand is less visible, creates a dynamic appearance. The opacity in the rendering of the figures, some of them missing parts of their bodies or heads, opposes the precision of other elements, such as faces. Rouy lets our brains work and complete the tableau we see in front of us.