It is customary to watch. We watch all day. Sometimes, we call this banal practice “bearing witness,” because it makes things sound heavier—as if it is a burden to watch and we choose to shoulder the responsibility. As if watching is not easy; as if watching is not the action that begets most good or bad that happens in the world. 

This tension, that between watching and bearing witness, is a little toy that I’ve invented for my idle brain to play with in the dark moments preceding painter George Rouy and choreographer Sharon Eyal’s BODYSUIT, a performance piece that inaugurates Rouy's first solo exhibition in the United States—The Bleed, Part II. The paintings will be on view at Hauser & Wirth until June 1st, but BODYSUIT is reserved for a lucky few in the know who can make themselves available on one of the three evenings it plays at the gallery in late February.

I’ve come to the theater after spending some time meandering through the gallery room that houses Rouy's The Bleed, Part II, where figures smear around the vague nucleus of corporeal form across large canvases. Rouy is young (31 years old, the youngest on Hauser & Wirth’s roster), and his paintings have garnered a fair amount of social buzz in the year following his induction into the gallery. It’s not difficult to understand why when encountering the work in person. Rouy’s figures, grouped together like a rat king, limbs barely distinguishable from one another, invoke a disturbing sense of carnality that catches the viewer off guard: should one stand too close, the flesh will beckon. 

Twenty minutes spent sublimated by the bodies in The Bleed, Part II before attending BODYSUIT will force one to think about their role as an audience member. To watch, to bear witness. To be a bystander, to be a consumer. To see, to understand. 

Myself and fifty or so others settle in the theater and bone-rattling bass (composed by Rouy in collaboration with Liam Toon (Bar Italia) and Oscar Defriez) slams from the speakers and pulls, like a wavering magnet, four male dancers adorned in flesh-toned full body unitards from the corner to the mirrored floor. Behind them looms a silver and graphite backdrop, auspicious, painted by Rouy. The performance is stupendous and strange, each dancer moving as if their entire being is a limb of the commune, joints tight and back muscles synchronous, each dancer breaking from the group for explosive solos and then returning to the rhythm until the female dancer enters the stage, nearly three quarters through, movements sharp and angular. The men coalesce, and the woman stands alone.

There is a physical barrier between the body and its environment that begins to lax while watching the show. Perhaps it is the darkness, or the proximity of the crowd. Perhaps it’s the pulse that replicates a heartbeat, or the strobes that light the figures from above. These factors dilate the pupils and soften the peripheral vision, quickening a resting heartbeat in time with stern techno, ensuring that the watcher—the witness—feels completely isolated from the rest of the crowd: instead, one with the tangle of dancers onstage. 

Rouy’s work is interesting not solely because of the way he brings forth physicality, but because of the way he considers the bodies of the audience as a part of the work itself. Vast stretches of skin, glitchy bones escaping canvas--these are made all the more interesting because of the nakedness of the viewer: at the whim of the scrutinized group, alone.