Watching the Earth set

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.