Artists have been both deified and damned by critics’ labels. Jerry Salz branded Damien Hirst ‘the Elvis of the English art world’, while Gillie and Marc were ‘the the worst artists in the world of public art’. The contemporary work of Jake Troyli garnered the tag ‘hot bombs with promise’, while Titian mocked Tintoretto as ‘a dauber’. More recently, the French/Cameroonian artist De Rrusie has been called, variously, a ‘prog rock Turner’, a ‘romantic’, ‘one of the finest emerging voices of his generation’ and, by way of the Mauritanian Fula people, ‘a spear of no country’ – descriptions drawn from his often-inscrutable bravura paintings and his equally cryptic, often wayfaring character. Which tag comes closest to the mark is still uncertain. The artist’s quiet physical presence – an uncalculated self-possession likely the result of his former career as an athlete – is the point of stillness against which the energy of his work explodes. But to label him as a savant situated out of his time is to miss the pop (or, rather, prog) bent to his practice. In pieces such as Medita 2 and Jenma one might see the passing shadow of JMW Turner’s 1842 Snow Storm and Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth or, in Tace, something of Rothko’s palette, yet the paintings are only one part of a broader practice that takes the present as its point of departure.
Responding to a fragmented Postmodern artistic landscape seen through a screen, De Rrusie creates physical, large-scale oil paintings. No wistful Romantic mourning the past, he also makes modern furniture and jewellery, and, in 2021, collaborated with French fashion label Fursac on a workwear collection. His inspiration is equally craft- and time-spanning: ‘Richter, Max Klinger, Tacita Dean, Degas and Da Vinci made lasting marks on me,’ he says. Though he is equally influenced by ‘close artist friends with a shared work ethic and taste’; the same goes for ‘every art form, from music and fashion to photography…’
De Rrusie had a peripatetic childhood, moving between continents. He was born in Cameroon and lived briefly in France and Burkina Faso before returning to Brittany, where he grew up in his grandparents’ home. In his teens and early twenties, he travelled between the US, Amsterdam and Spain, as well as visiting Mauritania, where he has family. This nomadic existence, and an early career as a professional basketball player, influenced a work pattern defined by movement: his painting is dynamic and his various studios alternate between ateliers and residency spaces.
His first work station was in the attic of his grandparents’ home, amid ‘old furniture, books, journals and encyclopaedias’. Decorating the staircase walls was a selection of artworks cut out from magazines. ‘I made my first studio space up there, spending whole nights juicing those archives,’ he says. ‘It gave me space to dive deep early on. But then you just want to have it your own way,’ he adds ruefully. Since then, he’s worked en plein studio, frequently changing spaces – his most recent was the loft of a warehouse-style gallery in Pantin, Paris. The fluctuations in atmosphere and light render a subtle change in his works: ‘The more natural light, the softer the works tend to be, even when adding a balance of roughness.’
After early experiments with ink on paper, he now paints ‘what could be seen as skies’ (for him, a subject that has a universal appeal): huge abstract oil works on canvas that fluctuate between dawn-light limpid blues and yellows, sunset reds, and dusk-dark violets and indigos. There are traces of pure orpiment, Tyrian purple, ivory, Prussian blue at the edges of the canvas, gradually suffused with light towards the centre. A tempest-like vista might be set off by a dash of green, like the optical flash seen when the sun dips below the horizon. At risk of returning to an earlier comparison, one is reminded of the scene in the film Mr Turner, directed by Mike Leigh, when the eponymous artist adds a red flick of paint to a seascape, rendering in abstract a life buoy. De Rrusie calls his superficial similarity to Turner the ‘chopped and screw’ version – a classicist ‘hanging out with the Lobi’.
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It’s worth noting, though, that De Rrusie was not formally trained as an artist – his first works were experiments with ink on paper. ‘I did a lot, non-stop, learning certain principles of rhythm, touch and decision-making – what is good, what is not, sharpening that trait until I started with colour, aiming to make wider and immersive pieces using the things I learnt from the ink,’ he says. At one point, once he’d established himself as something of an artistic force, he considered art school and attended a number of graduate classes. His decision not to continue down this particular path was deeply considered. Ultimately, he returned to self-study, feeling that, for him, the structure of the course and acquired techniques might change the intuitive way he paints.
Although there’s an obvious physicality to the paintings, as well as those Turner-esque brushed embellishments of light, De Rrusie has claimed to have found a ‘personal language beyond the physical’. This manifests in his ‘slow’ and ‘meditative’ approach to his practice; his way of apprehending the essence of a work, which he describes as a kind of ‘oil synesthesia’; and his idiosyncratic naming of the works: ‘I dig into words’ etymologies and create from there,’ he says. ‘It can range from Latin to Haalpulaar, or sometimes I do some neologism – again searching for a certain essence or sonority.’
‘Sonority’ is also a large part of making the works. ‘Music or sound is a crucial element,’ he says. ‘I have playlists that set a working atmosphere.’ He began ‘tinkering’ with instruments (piano and guitar), and roughly recording them. ‘I slow them down and get in the zone like that. I alternate, with music, surrounding noise and complete silence. I noticed that the closer to the “end” of the work, the more focused it gets and the more silence takes the space – it even turns musical.’
Creating work is, for him, a way of capturing some indefinite quality: ‘It’s like building a sentence to find its verb,’ he explains. As for how his compositions take shape, we come, perhaps inevitably, back to Turner – though, equally inevitably, remixed. ‘At the start, I feel like it is from an in-between, thin air and everywhere, a place caught with the guts. It’s directed transmissions of raw moments,’ says De Rrusie. ‘My work is to translate and refine it – like taming wind and light.’
To see more of De Rrusie’s work, visit Instagam @derrusie. For more about GSL Gallery, visit gsl.gallery. 27 bis Rue Jacques Cottin, 93500 Pantin, Paris
