Baited Pleasures: The Precarity of Desire

George Rouy

Squeeze Hard Enough It Might Just Pop!

The Hannah Barry Gallery, 1 February – 17 March

Exhibition Essay - See full publication here

Baited Pleasures: The Precarity of Desire

On more than one occasion George Rouy has mentioned to me the reading of his works as erotic. This he says, is not something he ever intended. The works are sensual and evocative sure, but not erotic. Unfortunately, despite his own interpretations I can’t help but be the one to make this connection. There is indeed something sensually erotic about George’s paintings – a point in which I’m sure I’m not alone –  but there is also a conceptual engagement with the question of eroticism per se: the ordering and codification of our libidinal economy in different socio-political paradigms. To use a term borrowed from the work of queer theorist Paul B. Preciado, the paintings on show at Squeeze Hard Enough It Might Just Pop! evaluate how our potentia gaudendi – the virtual capacity of our bodies to be excited, exciting or excited-with – is manifest in our current social milieu.

George frequently cites medieval art as a key source of inspiration in his paintings. The works of Jean Fouquet or Rogier van der Weyden for example. However, as both an aesthetic and conceptual genealogy to this exhibition (of which are there many), I can’t help but recall the infamous relationship between several works of two great modern painters: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) and Matisse’s The Dance II (1932). There is of course no drought of discourse surrounding these two paintings and their reflection on the status of sex, liberation and desire in early 20th century Europe. This was after all, a period defined by its intense urbanisation, furious imperial disputes and radical political upheaval. The history of Modern Art is typically seen through this lens, and the concurrent story of eroticism plays a decisive role. For some, eroticism in art had become a powerful weapon; a dagger to the heart of bourgeois taste.

In these paintings, we find a means of critique; an avenue of escape. In Les Demoiselles, Picasso uses afro-Cubist forms to provoke the viewer, deconstructing ideals of feminine and racialized beauty. The title draws attention to the roles that colonialism, sexual labour and class played in the construction of modern urban life; chastising the fraudulent values that relegated desire to a savage or ‘primitive’ sensibility. The Dance too presents five characters, this time bathed in a vivacious orange warmth, circling a clear hilltop in faunic revelry. Unlike Picasso’s confrontational stares the dancers are playfully indifferent. You, the viewer, are irrelevant to their primal cavort. The scene is knowingly utopic: a non-place. Somewhere beyond, out of reach of rational civil society. In each case, a violent rejection of classical Western form has charged their art with an erotic intensity; not only were their subject matters full of sex, but the unleashing of painting from its vapid constraints was a gesture itself full of libidinal menace.

Although there are clear formal semblances between these paintings and George’s own oeuvre, it is their differences that really interest me. Whilst they all share the use of a nominal setting, human corporeality and a subtle balance of affect and force, what allures me is how their representation of desire and the erotic has shifted from a modern to contemporary formulation; reading from Deleuze, from an architecture of discipline to the undulations of control. Contrary to those who cite a timeless or spectral quality to George’s work, my contention is that his paintings are in fact wholly contemporary, reflecting a new form of desire which – unlike its forbearers of the modern age – does not follow from narratives of order and repression, but rather produces the erotic through a heterogeneous network of soft technologies, audiovisual techniques and insidious forms of affective labour.

It is no coincidence that George’s paintings are heavily influenced by social media and Photoshop. Straight away we recognise an affective shift from the surface of The Dance to George’s Four Lounging (2018). Figures no longer glide across the face of the canvas, they recede into the hollow screen of an iPhone. The twilight sky – once conjuring peace, frivolity and freedom – now invokes the cataleptic shock of a corrupted MacBook. Even the blades of grass seem stolen from a Clip Art catalogue; delicate brushstrokes are mistaken for digital airbrush. Where previous bodies were clearly delineated or crested with geometric edges, George’s bodies subtly bleed into one another: an arm becomes a hip, a head becomes a head. Their peculiar anatomies and bent postures recall Schiele’s raw corporeal forms and their soft composure plays with Moore’s organic modernism. However, where these artists looked to a natural or ‘real’ state for the human condition, George makes no such suggestion. The characters are synthetic, and unapologetically so.

No longer confrontational, the gaze of his androgynous cast is vulnerable and needy; in some cases, they retain a vacant grin: a self-conscious apathy or social ennui. They’re teasing us. The pale figure in Gotcha (2018) reaches for stimulation but remains gormlessly satisfied in disappointment. The symbolic addition of the conch tantalises us further: an unattainable climax, lost at the end of the tunnel. By including two Geiger-like Chaise longue, the erotic potential of his paintings is diffused into the room, like a makeshift Chat Roulette. A cheeky red mask reminds us that everything can be siphoned into a cheap commodity, ready to endlessly circulate the web of artisanal brands. The erotic is no longer a form of critique or escape, rather a form of perennial enticement. A never-ending titillation-machine, producing embodiment as a reserve of psychosomatic sex-capital, ready to be provoked, harnessed and instrumentalised in our every finger tap and mouse click. A pop which never comes.