Rachel LeRoux’s debut solo show poignantly reflects on what is being held quietly

For Le Roux, who spent years navigating the independence and grit of London, the collaboration brought a welcome sense of belonging. “I was drawn to her values… She has that kind of presence where, when she speaks, you listen,” she says of Nuyda.

Nuyda frames the exhibition through a concept she calls “studio ecology”. It is the idea that in an artist’s practice, nothing is truly discarded. This is most visible in the dialogue between Le Roux’s figurative works and her abstracts. The latter often begin with physical remnants of the former—paint scraped from the palette after a day of rendering the female form. “I don’t think I’m wiping the slate clean but rather giving something that might otherwise be discarded a new life,” Le Roux explains, gesturing to an abstract piece vibrant with kinetic energy. “The paint I scrape off my palette carries a certain energy I can’t explain… The leftovers give me a starting point.”

For Nuyda, this ensures the relationship between the genres is not linear but cyclical. “Meaning shifts, materials shift and intention evolves, but nothing is wasted,” she observes.

As we move deeper into the exhibition, the shift from ‘Echoes’ to ‘Conversations’ becomes palpable. The ‘Echoes’ represent the foundations of Le Roux’s practice—expressive compositions shaped by questions of identity and projection.

 “The figures I painted were my way of sharing what I was going through without words,” Le Roux admits, looking back at her earlier canvases. “I painted my story in bodies and faces that didn’t belong to me, but the emotion was all mine.”

However, the newer works—the ‘Conversations’—reveal a woman who has stopped searching for herself in the distance and started finding herself in the details. The focus tightens to the curve of a shoulder, the weight of skin, the softness of a torso.

 “With ‘Conversations’, something shifted,” Le Roux says. “I no longer felt the need to step back. I moved closer.” She describes this transition as switching from a wide lens of ‘who am I?’ to a macro lens of ‘how does this feel?’ “This closeness… allowed me to feel more present and, in many ways, more honest,” she adds. 

Le Roux’s background in interior architecture—she trained at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London and spent over a decade in the industry—is the invisible scaffolding that holds these fluid works together. Yet, where architecture relies on beams and columns, Le Roux relies on the “weight of a breath”.

“When I talk about the ‘weight of a breath’, I’m really talking about a pause,” Le Roux explains. “So yes, in that sense, it does become this invisible structural element, something that holds the work (and me) together in a quiet way.”

This appreciation for the negative space—the in-between—is a shared language between artist and curator. Nuyda admits that curating 41 works in such a specific venue required using this negative space as an active curatorial tool. “For me, curating silence is about rhythm and balance,” Nuyda says. “It’s about knowing when to cluster works into conversation and when to isolate them so the viewer can slow down.”

In Le Roux’s paintings, this absence is not emptiness; it is atmosphere. “It’s just about recognising that moment where nothing is happening, but so much is felt,” Le Roux muses. “It’s not about what’s missing but rather what’s being held quietly.”

Perhaps the most poignant revelation is Le Roux’s admission that her artistic process is one of subtraction. After years in the corporate world of London, where she learned to “show up, work hard and carry my own weight,” painting became a way to unlearn the need for armour.

“The vulnerability in my work does come through a kind of editing,” she reflects. “Over time, I’ve learned to strip away what feels protective or unnecessary.”

This stripping back allows for a raw, unfiltered dialogue between the viewer and the subject. The women on the canvas—though not autobiographical—serve as vessels for a shared emotional register. “The goal was never to present a diary, but a shared emotional register,” Nuyda clarifies. “I focused on gesture, posture and atmosphere, so the viewer encounters not only Rachel herself, but ‘she, whoever she may be.’”

The distinction between the ‘Echoes’ of the past and the ‘Conversations’ of the present blurs. Nuyda did not force a strict separation; instead, she allowed the works to bleed gently into one another, creating a “rhythm of encounter rather than confrontation”.

It is a fitting metaphor for Le Roux’s own journey—a reconciliation of her dual roots in the UK and the Philippines, her dual careers in architecture and fine art and the dual instincts of control and release.

“I didn’t want to frame one as dependent on the other,” Nuyda concludes, pertaining to the section where abstraction and figuration sit side by side. “Together they reveal how her mind works: fluid, layered and unconcerned with artificial divisions.”

Echoes and Conversations is not merely an exhibition of paintings; it is a testament to the power of the “in-between”. It is in that suspended space—between the scrap of paint and the finished canvas, between the intake of breath and the exhale—that Le Roux has finally, and fully, arrived.

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