Watching the earth set; somewhere that doesn’t belong to earth.
Another day spent looking outside the window, so long, that the view falls deep and sleeps into fabrication.
What a time it has been to be a witness. Across the window, borders and planets.I landed on the sun, and even my accounts of the momentous event burned to ashes.
Will it be romantic? when the earth sets or will that be it
Nour El Saleh’s pictorial universe sabotages aesthetics underpinnings. Scraggy figures, disproportionate and grotesque, stare on in their lanky nakedness while they are being seemingly peeked at through a surveillance camera. Selfhood and otherness hold hands in a stirring push and pull of tenderness and repulsion. Bodies like a simulacrum of decay, flesh translucent. In the normative cosmic order we would rationally have them falling within, they act like chiaroscuro in a painting that make the light stand out. Yet much of this light in Saleh’s languid scenes is a vital flow of connectivity among beings and their environment that eloquently eclipses narrative.
Watching the Earth set is Nour El Saleh’s first solo show with the gallery.
