This September, Guerin Projects presents British painter Ru Knox in the Solo Contemporary section of the British Art Fair, curated by Xavier Ellis at the Saatchi Gallery. Running from September 25 to 28, the fair is set once again to showcase the vitality of contemporary practice within the framework of modern British art.
For founder and curator Marie-Claudine Llamas, the presentation continues her mission to champion artists whose work sits at the edge of tradition and innovation. Knox’s new body of work, developed specifically for this edition of the fair, looks to dance—particularly the shifting gestures of ballerinas—as a vehicle for exploring time, transience, and memory. The artist’s treatment is neither decorative nor sentimental. Instead, his figures emerge fractured and faceted, recalling the language of Cubism while probing the liminal states between waking and dream.
The references are deliberate. Degas’s ballerinas hover in the background, not as stylistic templates but as historical touchpoints in the story of how modernism grappled with movement and fleeting perception. Equally present is Kandinsky’s insistence on the spiritual dimension of motion, a reminder that abstraction was born not from formal trickery but from attempts to locate an “inner value” in gesture. Knox situates himself within this lineage while drawing it forward into the present.
For Knox, dance is not a metaphor but a method. In conversation with Guerin Projects, he described his interest in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states—the unstable borderlands of consciousness where images and sounds slip into one another. His paintings aim to capture those dissolving thresholds, translating them into form, colour, and texture. The figures appear sculptural, almost architectural, yet are constantly in flux, suggesting that perception is never fixed but continuously remade in the act of looking.
Llamas sees this approach as a continuation of her own curatorial ethos. With Guerin Projects, founded in 2022, she has sought to create platforms that allow artists to expand their vocabulary without compromise. A classically trained artist herself, she works closely with those she presents, grounding her selections in long-term dialogue rather than market expediency. “Each exhibition is months, sometimes years, in the making,” she notes, emphasising the necessity of fit between artist, work, and context.
Knox’s trajectory reflects that ethos. Trained in Florence under Charles Cecil, where observational precision and draughtsmanship are paramount, he later completed a Master’s at City and Guilds of London Art School. That move opened the door to experimentation: textures layered against figuration, the measured line disrupted by emotional charge. His 2020 debut, Rapture at Waluso Gallery, signalled this shift, while subsequent appearances at Volta, The Other Art Fair, and Art in the Age of Now positioned him firmly within the emerging generation of British painters seeking new ground between the classical and the contemporary.
The works on show at the British Art Fair continue this negotiation. They are haunted by history yet unafraid of fracture; anchored in the discipline of paint yet animated by the instability of dream. Knox’s practice suggests that painting remains a site where the psychological, the sensory, and the historical converge—where even the lightest trace of a dancer’s step can open onto the unsteady terrain of the subconscious.