LONDON.- When the doors of the Saatchi Gallery open on 25th September for the preview of British Art Fair 2025, visitors entering the Solo Contemporary section will encounter a body of work that is at once lyrical, ephemeral, and deeply rooted in the history of abstraction.
Guerin Projects, led by curator Marie-Claudine Llamas, presents a solo booth dedicated to the British painter Ru Knox, whose new canvases explore the fragile yet powerful language of movement, memory, and dream.
Knox’s latest series draws inspiration from the gestures of ballerinas. Their bodies—captured mid-motion—become allegories for the fleeting nature of time and the delicate thresholds between reality and imagination. In these paintings, dance is not a subject rendered literally, but a prism through which abstraction is reimagined. The dancers’ gestures dissolve into form, line, and texture, evoking both the fragility of flesh and the permanence of memory.
Between Movement and Abstraction
Knox’s work converses across time with two figures who revolutionized how art and dance could be understood. From Wassily Kandinsky, whose Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) argued for the inner meaning of motion as a path toward abstraction, Knox inherits the belief that gesture can transcend the physical body. Kandinsky saw beauty even in the so-called “ugly” movement—an insight that paved the way for dance as abstraction and painting as rhythm. Knox’s canvases embrace this philosophy, where the form of a dancer’s bent arm or poised leg becomes less a depiction than a vibration, a pulse of inner life.
The second ghostly interlocutor is Edgar Degas, whose Impressionist studies of ballerinas offered an entirely new way of seeing movement and narrative. Degas’s young dancers, bathed in pastel light, became icons of early modernism. Knox references this legacy but reconfigures it: where Degas sought to pin down fleeting gestures with immediacy, Knox amplifies their dissolution. His ballerinas are not fixed in space but fractured, prismatic, faceted—like memories half-remembered in dream.
Curatorial Vision
For Guerin Projects founder Marie-Claudine Llamas, who curated the booth, Knox’s paintings resonate on a level beyond formal invention. Marie-Claudine Llamas observes: “Ru’s paintings are extraordinary in their rendition of abstraction: he uses the form and movement of the ballerina to articulate his compositions. His paintings are visualisations of sound and rhythm.”
This emphasis on rhythm is crucial. Dance here is not merely thematic, but a methodology—a structure through which Knox builds his abstractions. Like a score, the canvases pulse with tempo, syncopation, and pause.
The curatorial context of the Solo Contemporary section, under the direction of Zavier Ellis, underscores Knox’s position within a generation of British artists who are re-examining the ties between tradition and innovation. Guerin Projects, which has rapidly established itself as one of London’s most thoughtful new platforms for contemporary art, provides the perfect stage for this conversation.
Echoes of Martha Graham
Knox’s works might also be seen in dialogue with the radical vocabulary of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham, described by TIME magazine as the “Dancer of the Century.” Graham rejected the idea that dance must always be graceful, insisting instead that it must be “true.” She created a repertoire that drew from architecture, emotion, and ritual—unearthing the raw depths of human psychology through movement.
Knox takes this ethos into paint. His dancers are not frozen in idealized arabesques but caught in moments of rupture, vulnerability, and transition. The surfaces are textured, layered, and worked in ways that recall Graham’s emotional intensity. Where Graham used the body to excavate emotion, Knox uses pigment. Both search for an essence that lies beneath appearances: a truth made visible through form.
Dream States and the Subconscious
Knox himself describes this series as a continuation of his exploration of liminal states—the fragile borderlands between waking and sleeping, known as the hypnagogic and hypnopompic phases. In these threshold moments, perception becomes fluid; boundaries between reality and dream dissolve.
“Gesture, posture, and motion act as visual echoes of sound and emotion,” Knox notes. “The figures appear as if seen from multiple angles at once, embodying a sense of presence and inviting kinesthetic engagement.”
This notion of seeing from multiple perspectives recalls the fractured bodies of Cubism or even Futurism’s attempts to capture velocity, but Knox’s interpretation remains distinct. His figures are sculptural and faceted, yet they resist rigid formalism. They float in ambiguous space, shimmering between corporeality and dissolution.
Such ambiguity is central to Knox’s practice. Rather than closing meaning, his canvases open it—inviting viewers to project their own subconscious associations. The work, in other words, is not to be deciphered but to be felt.
From Florence to London
Knox’s distinctive visual language is the product of a rare combination: rigorous classical training and restless experimentation. He spent over a decade under the tutelage of Charles Cecil in Florence, mastering observational precision and the handling of paint. He later became a tutor at the Studios himself, before pursuing further study at City & Guilds of London Art School, where he completed a Master’s in Fine Art.
This classical foundation, fused with contemporary inquiry, has given Knox both the discipline and the freedom to develop his signature style. His 2020 debut solo show Rapture at Waluso Gallery attracted collectors’ attention, while subsequent exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and in the ambitious Art in the Age of Now at Fulham Town Hall in 2021 cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling voices in the British art scene.
His participation in international fairs—from Volta to London Art Fair—has brought his work to wider audiences, but the British Art Fair 2025 marks a new milestone: a solo presentation in one of the UK’s most prestigious art events, under the curatorial guidance of a rising star.
Guerin Projects: A Curatorial Force
The role of Guerin Projects in shaping this exhibition is pivotal. Founded in 2022 by Marie-Claudine Llamas, the platform has quickly gained recognition for its daring yet poetic approach to curation. Rooted in Romantic sensibilities, Llamas’s projects often seek to balance emotion with intellect, history with the now.
Her track record includes acclaimed exhibitions such as The Power of She at Bowman Sculpture and a celebrated photography presentation by James D. Kelly at Photo London, praised by The Times, The Guardian, and Forbes. What distinguishes her approach is an attentiveness not just to artworks but to the artists themselves—their processes, their inner worlds, and their stories.
For Llamas, curation is never neutral; it is a form of dialogue and care. “Each exhibition I curate is the result of months, sometimes years of conversations and critical work with the artist,” she explains. This attentiveness is evident in her presentation of Knox, whose complex practice benefits from her sensitive framing.
The Dance of the Future
At the heart of Knox’s paintings lies an ancient paradox: how to capture movement in stillness, how to make paint speak of rhythm and breath. From Degas to Kandinsky, from Graham to Knox, the challenge has always been the same—how to transform the ephemeral into the eternal.
In this new series, Knox’s canvases hum with that paradox. They are both precise and dreamlike, disciplined and volatile, abstract and bodily. They invite us into the space where the subconscious meets the visible, where dance becomes painting and painting becomes memory.
As the British Art Fair 2025 unfolds within the walls of the Saatchi Gallery, Guerin Projects’ solo booth will stand as a testament to this vision. Here, amidst the bustle of the fair, visitors will be asked not simply to look, but to listen—to the quiet rhythms of paint, the echoes of gesture, and the silent music of form.
British Art Fair is at Saatchi Gallery, London from 25-28 September, 2025.
