Muscle Memory - Leopoldo Gout: OCD Gallery
Upcoming Exhibitions exhibition
Overview
The body does not forget
Muscle Memory evokes the quiet intelligence of the body, its ability to store
movement and emotion, long after the conscious mind has moved on. In Leopoldo
Gout's stark, meditative figure paintings, the human form is not simply rendered; it is recalled.
These bodies are not portraits but imprints, shadows of gestures repeated over time,
traces of what was once lived, touched, held, or lost. Working in black and white,
Gout strips the figure to its essentials: line, posture, tension. Each figure appears
suspended in a moment between motion and stillness, presence and absence. There
is no direct narrative, only sensation, the architecture of muscle, the echo of weight, the syntax of the limb.
Memory in these works is not psychological but embodied. It sits in the bend of the
knee, the curve of a spine, the slight tilt of a head. Gout draws from a visual language
rooted in both anatomy and instinct, blending the clinical precision of the diagram
with the raw immediacy of emotional mark-making. These are bodies that remember, not through storytelling, but through form.
In Muscle Memory, the body becomes both subject and archive: a vessel of gestures
performed, inherited, and repressed. Gout invites us to witness that which cannot be spoken, but can still be felt, held deep in the flesh.
Installation Views
