Elsa Rouy – A Screaming Object at Guts Gallery, Hackney, East London, December 2024 – Guts, as annoying as they sometimes are, can easily be forgiven for saying they are “incredibly excited to present A Screaming Object; a solo presentation of ambitious, boundary-pushing new work by London-based artist Elsa Rouy”. The online preview did look, well yes, it did look  exciting, the main focus of the excitement being a a 7.5 metre long frieze made up of five large-scale canvases. That main five canvas piece looked like something that really needed to be seen for the first time with none of the clutter of an opening night cool-kid crowd or the bad lighting at Guts (it is a gallery best visited during daylight hours, not that east at this time of year), best to wait and catch it when no one much is there to stand in the way sucking down the free beer and chatting in front of the painting at the opening.

Off up Mare Street then, off to the other side of Hackney Central on what is hopefully a very quiet Thursday afternoon, a quick break from the studio and throwing my on paint, off up to Andre Street and those ever evolving graff pieces on the outside of the caves that are the railway arches, say hello to the Andre Street cat who looks like a bit of a bruiser but always has time to say hello back. There’s always a bit of a ritual involved in going to see a new art exhibition, the going there is part of it, the anticipation, the hope. Andree Street is still alive with about a dozen small car repair garages in the railway arches, it is one of the more alive streets, Guts is a couple of floors up in a new build above the current home of Chrome and Black and all those delicious racks of spray paint. The unforgiving mirrored lift up to the gallery once you’ve got past the front door buzzer almost throws you straight into the space and wow, there it is on your left…      

“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….”

And yes, wow, and yes, got the place to myself, no one in here, excellent, although it does immediately feel kind of semi-voyeuristic, almost like you’re looking in on something private, that you really should not be there in the silence of the gallery just looking at it like this, in here stepping back from it, walking up to it, walking along it. Yes there is a tension, there is a sense of something rather charged in her almost ghostly figures, you do feel like you’ve walked in on something you shouldn’t have and the polite thing would be to quietly turn and walk the other way. Actually it feels that way with the three much small pieces that are also on the walls in here, there’s a smaller piece called Cutting Corners that is particularly charged.

Now when you get over the first initial rush of seeing the big central work and you start to explore the narrative, the uneasiness, the pleasure if it is that? When you start to read it it, you soon realise you are not the only one looking, you may be the only person in the room, but there’s other figures, in the painting, in the painting and just looking and you are maybe not the only one who might be feeling a little a self-conscious here. Some of those figures are ghostly, distorted even? We don’t quite know what is going on, what is the embrace about? Is any of it obvious? Does it want to be? Sexual charged? Self-mutilation?  It is a dark piece of work, these are dark pieces of work, dark in terms of the actual way it is painted, dark in terms of subject matter. A cloying atmosphere? Fragmentary? it is a vast piece, a brave piece, a strong piece, a statement piece and yes maybe it does feel a touch like a theatre stage and just as a painter, before you get to what she paints, Elsa Rouy has an interesting way of doing things, an interesting technique, or set of combined techniques that all come together a one whole in a strong strong way. I like her mark making, her brush movement. her painterly energy, her use of colour that isn’t always ‘nice’, her suggestions, expressions. Words like ‘nice’ or ‘like’ are the right ones here, hope you get the drift, some of this is… well no, you go see and decide what you feel it is, these bold paintings feel like things to quietly see for yourself, to engage with, they don’t feel like that want to be described, they don’t feel like they want someone like me telling you what I think although I think I did leave feeling rather positive about it all, about Elsa Rouy  as a painter, and yes, as annoying as Guts are, they’ve done well here, they often do, this is a rather recommended exhibition. Watch out for Elsa Rouy. (sw) 

         

Guts Gallery is found at Unit 2, Sidings House,
10 Andre Street,
 London, E8 2AA. Guts is open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am until 6pm. Elsa Rouy‘s A Screaming Object runs until 21st Dec 2024.

Previously at Guts via these pages–

ORGAN THING: Andre Street’s cave walls, up to the Guts of it all again, AJ Bravo’s paint, the Purity and Danger, that and Lily Bunney’s girls peeing on cars…

ORGAN THING: Cut through the darkness and all the self congratulating and there is some good art to be found in Buffer 2, the latest Guts Gallery group show…

As always, do click on an image to see the whole thing or to run the slide show