It might be amusing to suggest that the line between abstraction and affectation is fine, but that’s quite literally the case in Rouy’s quasi-figurative paintings. His group oil portraits, or, more accurately, mid-mortems of living bodies being exploded together, look for reprieve in sketchy overlays intended to confuse the viewer and the nature of things themselves.

Torsoso, buttocks, and limbs pile up together, but not too indiscernibly, one drawing too closely on the next. A lone charcoal gave rise to all this, we’re told, but it ran out of its representational payload before it reached the next canvas. Rouy’s figures are too studiously removed, their correspondence to a false original too neat. Even the works’ surface finishes — afterthoughts borrowed from Twombly and Richter — betray timidity when faced with their own image.