About

El-Saieh’s dense and rhythmic paintings derive inspiration from myriad sources, ranging from the history of international abstraction to Haitian Vodou traditions, such as trance-induction and percussive music. Obsessive markings—notations, shapes, scratches, and erasures—saturate the surfaces of his canvases, creating fields of bursting, complex color. The synesthetic, all-over compositions that El-Saieh produces through his meticulous process are at once sublime and sensual, mystical and direct, chaotic and restrained. While firmly planted in the realm of abstraction, El-Saieh’s paintings …