Skin is the main barrier between our insides and the outside world. It is variously tough and penetrable, neatly containing our blood and guts while also being vulnerable to external prods and pressures. In Elsa Rouy’s new paintings (at GNYP in Berlin), the skin is rendered viscerally in thick paint. Sometimes it seems waxy and stretched, as though her figures are wrapped in plastic packaging or hovering somewhere between living, breathing human and inanimate doll; in other works, it is broken and bruised, slashed through with thin streaks of paint, bubbling up from layers underneath, or flushed from burst capillaries under the surface. She also plays with items of clothing – removed from specific markers of time or culture –…