What makes a good contemporary figurative artist?

Figurative painting has been everywhere these past few years. But far from constituting a return to a narrative form of art, the best figurative artists of today seem to have transcended figuration by bending the formal aspects of their art to its emotional necessity. These artists have developed a visual language so closely tied to what they are trying to express that form and content become difficult to separate.

Yu Nishimura

Since the early 2000s, the artist has explored what might be described as an aesthetic of disappearance, focusing on what sits at the margins of attention: moments that are half-glimpsed, softened by time, or remembered imprecisely. Working primarily in oil and tempera, he builds images through the accumulation of slightly misaligned layers: fragments of figures, architecture, colour fields and outlines that never fully resolve into a single, fixed scene.

His muted palette—beiges, greyish pinks, faded blues—reinforces this sense of images filtered through recollection rather than direct observation. Understated, the result is not a dramatic feeling of silence or absence but a subtle and poetic reflection on how vision actually behaves: selectively, cumulatively, and often imperfectly. Nishimura’s canvases do not aim for a single, authoritative reading. Instead, they accommodate shifts in attention, multiple impressions and the instability inherent in how images form internally before they reach articulation. Even when a figure appears, it tends to function less as a portrait subject than as an anchor point within a drifting composition.

In essence: In Nishimura’s work, the form becomes evanescent because perception itself is unstable. The slight misalignments, softened contours and layered surfaces are inseparable from the way memory and perception actually operate.

Nathanaëlle Herbelin

The artist begins to paint directly on canvas, without prior drawings. Few layers are applied, and the final result is frequently scraped. With a colour palette sometimes reminiscent of frescoes—powdery, neutral tones brightened up by areas of pure, bright colour—she usually goes on to tell intimate stories and memories, which she wraps in poetry and sensibility (certain elements of her canvases are softened to illustrate the impact of time on memory).

Whether directly visible through a human figure or not, a human presence is always felt in her work: even when only cold interiors are depicted–in the manner of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi—a trace of human passage, like a displaced object, is always suggested. Her work is also characterized by a constant clash of dualities: intimacy and universality, the atmospheres of both France and Israel, tension and gentleness, domestic yet cold interiors. All of this contributes to a dreamy feeling that emanates from her canvases.

In essence: Herbelin’s restraint seems particularly well suited to the kind of memory she paints. Scraped surfaces, softened elements and powdery colours allow intimate scenes to remain present while already carrying the effects of distance and time. In Herbelin’s work, memory gradually softens and displaces the image. Not unlike within Nishimura’s work, the formal delicacy of Herbelin’s images thus mirrors the fragility of recollection itself.

George Rouy

The young painter’s work uses the human figure as a means of emotional expression, questioning ambiguous themes like gender identity or sexuality, without however becoming narrative: “it’s less about narratives and more about emotions–akin to life”, Rouy reminds us. His figures thus acquire a mysterious appearance, bestowed upon them by the contradictory yet complementary dynamics at play: monstrous mutations and harmony, rapture and torment, distance and proximity. As Rouy explains: “I am constantly flirting with [contradiction]. It’s the basis of my approach and my work exists best when it exists between two realms: beautiful/ugly, emotional/non-emotional, figurative/abstract…”

In the last decade, the abstract nature of his paintings was progressively heightened. But far from being a formal intellectual whim, this formal evolution was purposefully aimed at expressing psychological content and bodily feelings more directly and acutely. In truth, they constitute a maturation of Rouy’s longstanding intent towards painting: going beyond narration and tapping directly into the human psyche to exhibit corporal and psychological sensations at the core of human condition.

In essence: In Rouy’s work, the form often oscillates between figuration and abstraction, thick impastos or diluted washes, bodily presence and aerial vanishing. But the evolution of his work always mirrors his own internal necessity: as the emotional content Rouy wants to express evolves, so do the paintings. Rouy’s overall career is a good indicator of this: it is actually quite impressive the wide array of styles he has appropriated throughout the years.

Issy Wood

The painter often isolates fragments of bodies or objects, creating images that feel both intimate and estranged, as personal details from her life coexist with an impersonal detachment. Displaying a stream-of-consciousness type of visual language, her paintings have thus often and have been compared to digital moodboards: fragmentary, diaristic, and structured around visual associations rather than narrative coherence.

Rather than depicting dramatic scenes or recognisable narratives, Wood constructs images in which emotion is embedded in surfaces—leather, porcelain, velvet, skin—, producing a form of painting that reflects the texture of contemporary life. Her paintings suggest that in a culture saturated with images and commodities, identity may be constructed less through events than through the objects that surround us. But the objects depicted by Wood function as psychological proxies rather than neutral still-life subjects. Indeed, behind apparently ordinary motifs, Wood explores themes such as desire, refusal, interiority, and self-reflection. The artist's fascination with materials like leather and velvet, and her attraction to rare and luxurious objects, evoke a world of fantasy and eroticism. This tension is frequently reinforced by an atmosphere of irony or unease, in which attractive surfaces coexist with psychological discomfort.

On top of that, in front of Issy Wood’s paintings, you get the strong feeling that this is the art of someone who grew up with a smartphone in hand. Hyperfocused on particular details much like a photo gallery on a smartphone, her fragmented, selective gaze thus says something strong about our contemporary relationship to images. As such, her work strongly resonates with a generation shaped by social media.

In essence: Wood’s formal language seems to grow directly out of the psychological role she gives to objects. Tight cropping, dark tonalities, obsessive attention to texture and the isolation of fragments all allow surfaces—leather, porcelain, velvet or skin—to carry desire and discomfort. The material and formal qualities of her images thus become the adequate means through which the artist’s psychology and relationship to imagery (and, in turn, our own) shine through.

Enrico David

Trained at Central Saint Martins, where he graduated in Sculpture in 1994, David has built these last decades a body of work centred on the human figure—not as a stable subject, but as a mutable structure, constantly undergoing transformation. His works thus examine vulnerability, instability and metamorphosis through an ever-shifting set of materials and formats. His formal language has evolved organically, driven by an ongoing inquiry into how bodies bend, fragment and hover between legibility and distortion. Whether rendered in plaster, bronze, fabric, paint or charcoal, his figures appear suspended in states of becoming—animated by psychological, physical or imaginative shifts.

According to the artist, human nature through all its external aspects—facial expressions, bodily postures, etc.—has long been what drives his creative process. The sculptor sees himself as both a vehicle to express human emotions and a provider of a new form of reality that exceeds any form of determinism.

In essence: David’s figures are in constant transformation precisely because human instability is the central subject of his work. The formal plurality of his work is hence closely tied to the mutable conception of the human figure at the core of his practice.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin's signature style took shape quite early on by blurring the lines between art and life, incorporating her own experiences, memories, and emotions into her work in a reflective way.

Her work is so intrinsically tied to her lived experience that she couldn’t produce the same work twice if you asked her. In fact someone did ask her. When offered a million pounds to remake her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), that had been destroyed in a fire, Emin declined, explaining: “I had the inclination and inspiration 10 years ago to make that, I don't have that inspiration and inclination now ... My work is very personal, which people know, so I can't create that emotion again—it's impossible.” The artist has often been accused of taking pleasure from delving into obscenity, but her paintings tell a different story: subject matter is merely a means to an end. And the end is truly a personal expression of cathartic nature.

Indeed, if her drawings and paintings are so impactful, it is because they successfully provide intimate glimpses into her thoughts and feelings. Formally inspired by abstract expressionism, Emin nonetheless paves her own way: her paintings express her emotions in the most direct and figurative way, whilst abstracting away the setting and some elements of the human figure (the faces, for instance) to make them more universally relatable. Upon gazing at them, one can sense that everything in them is about raw emotion: love, trauma, grief, or desire, to name a few.

In essence: Tracey Emin’s work is inseparable from the emotional state that produced it. In her brilliant paintings, the mark-making retains nothing but the full intensity of the lived experiences that she needed to express. The link between form and inner necessity could not be more explicit.  

Last words

So, how do you spot a good figurative artist nowadays? All of them seem to persistently search for a form capable of carrying specific emotional content: bodily tensions and psychological universality for Rouy and Emin, the evanescence of memory and perception for Nishimura, desire for Wood, instability for David, intimate recollection for Herbelin. As they succeed in finding these adequate means, their work in turn resonates with us, as we recognize the same emotional content within ourselves. In short: what truly distinguishes the strongest figurative artists today from the mass of competent figurative painting around them is that their visual languages were shaped by what they needed the work to express.