Juxtapoz Magazine - Nour El Saleh "Interface" @ GNYP Gallery, Berlin

"El Saleh 's painting Spleen is, characteristically, a convocation of unanswerable queries: where, when, who, what level(s) of reality? (The exhibition title, , might suggest the confected environments of video games.) All of this reflects, in turn, the fact that the artist only arrived shortly before we did. She almost always begins painting without knowing what she's going to paint, working towards a heightened hinge zone where it's clear something is about to happen, but not what."

"Within all of this, some certainties. El Saleh paints bodies in extremis, as if flesh were semaphoring inward emotional states, as if emotions reshaped physiognomy, sat literally close to the bone. Hands and feet, here, are as articulate and emphatic as eyes. Figures feel deeply, and sometimes we can intuit what: the relatable desire for change, mingled with fear of its consequences."

"Smaller figures, alternative selves perhaps, pop out of portals in skin (see Spoon-feed) or appear cradled in a bigger figure's bony digits (sleepy lavender). In the reversible Fracture plane, a body transforms into a moth. In Flytrap, a moth-like human flies across the sky, like in a dream: to fall or soar or, the title hints, to be trapped after chasing light. Weather can feel like a character, an abstract cue."

Paintings create disorienting arrival points that place viewers among curious, nauseated, and fearful onlookers observing a large, naked, long-fingered figure on a hilltop. Ambiguity pervades time, place, identity, and reality levels, and environments read like game-like or confected spaces. Bodies register inner states through contortion, with hands and feet as communicative as faces. Smaller figures emerge from skin portals or nestle in larger digits; bodies metamorphose into moths and moth-like humans chase light. Works are made without fixed plans, advancing toward hinge moments where something imminent is sensed but unspecified. Weather and atmosphere operate as active, abstract cues.

Read at Juxtapoz