George Rouy — Château de Boisgeloup, Gisors — Point de vue — Slash Paris

George Rouy — Shadowing @ Château de Boisgeloup, Faba - Fundacion Almine and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso from October 25 to November 23. Learn more Dazzling in its beauty, the exhibition Shadowing at the Château de Boisgeloup unfolds an exceptional series of paintings exploring themes of confinement and liberation. In the main series, bodies are compressed within the edges of the canvas, piling up and overlapping, breaking every line of escape and disguising hope beneath the painter’s gestures. Yet within each work, a detail—a hip, a twist, a suspended gaze—seems to announce the possibility of emancipation. Like the desire lines traced by animals through habit and persistence, Rouy’s figures open new paths, unexpected passages toward otherness and freedom.

In this world of the organic and the spectral, the human form is undone and transcended. Faces, sometimes absent, sometimes disembodied—generated by artificial intelligence and given new life through paint—question the persistence of vision and the traces left amid today’s saturation of images. The English painter, born in 1994, explores the very boundaries of representation and gender, as if his work sought, through matter itself, to grasp the dynamics of the psyche and the fractures of our augmented humanity.

Anchored in the history of painting and haunted by the memory of Picasso, whose spirit still lingers in the Boisgeloup studio, the exhibition moves beyond the play of signs to engage with the living forces of creation: gesture, perception, and emotion as they pass through representation. Drawing inspiration from both medieval and modern art, Rouy composes scenes in which the grotesque, the monstrous, and the uncomfortable never undermine coherence. Each painting becomes a study of the unstable balance between the intimate and the mythological, between the organic warmth of flesh and the coldness of bodies stripped of clear expression.

Constantly lagging behind what he perceives, disconnected from the present that outpaces him, the viewer is drawn into a movement he can never tell whether he is observing or undergoing. Following Rouy, he plunges into an “unscripted chaos” where degeneration becomes an ultimate aim and sublime blossoms without reason, maybe without beauty.

Transcending tradition and moving fluidly across boundaries through technical mastery and inventiveness, George Rouy unfolds a painting practice of rare intensity that this exhibition beautifully reflects. Overwhelmed by the force of his subjects, his work seems to yield them authority—as if the bodies themselves, now conscious, were the true authors of all possible narratives.