Guerin Projects founder Marie-Claudine Llamas is presenting a curated selection of new works by Ru Knox at British Art Fair. This new body of work by British artist Ru Knox focuses and describes with great beauty the movements made by ballerinas, their gestures becoming allegories to the passing of time and the ethereality of life. The works are ephemeral in their subject matter, but grounded in history, referencing Wassily Kandinsky’s (1866-1944) “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, and the inner meaning of motion which led to the birth of abstraction: “The inner value of each movement will soon be felt, as the inner beauty replaces the sensuous aspect. Thus, ‘ugly’ movements suddenly appear beautiful, from which an undreamed power and vital force will burst forth instantly. This will start the dance of the future.” Ru’s works also reference Degas’s famous impressionist renditions of young ballerinas, bathed in Impressionism, those works were a crucial part of early Modernism, the understanding of space, and the recollections of nostalgic narration.

Curator and Guerin Projects founder MC Llamas says: “In his most recent body of work, Ru Knox uses dance to articulate composition, his brush creates the liaisons between the movements of the medium, orchestrated by the artist, conductor of the paint.”

One could associate Ru’s paintings to movements and ethos created by choreographer Martha Graham, named by TIME magazine as “Dancer of the Century.” Graham created 181 ballets and a dance technique that has been compared to ballet in its scope and magnitude. Her approach to dance and theatre revolutionized the art form, and she built a vocabulary of movement that would “increase the emotional activity of the dancer’s body” and expose the depths of human emotion through movement.

“Dance followed the path of modern painting and architecture, rejecting pure decorativism. Dance does not have to be ‘graceful’, but true.” Martha Graham – Blood Memory (1991) Ru has a rare and potent emotional expression which has culminated from years of imaginative experimentation with various painting techniques and textures. His Florentine observational precision and handling of the paint, textures and forms capture the psychology and immortalise the souls of his sitters.

Ru’s works are expeditions into our common and universal subconscious, moments and experiences which we share, but cannot be shared. Our dreams are the only things that belong solely to ourselves. These otherwise innocuous abstracts give way to a complex and fraught inner emotional life. Ru Knox comments: “This series deepens my ongoing exploration of the liminal states between waking and sleep–the hypnagogic and hypnopompic moments where perception becomes fluid and the boundaries between reality and dream dissolve.

Building on past inquiries into the relationship between music and visual form, these paintings introduce the human body as a vessel of expression–figures rendered as sculptural, faceted forms that suggest movement, dance, and physical memory. Gesture, posture, and motion act as visual echoes of sound and emotion, weaving the senses together.