March 29 – May 4, 2015

Opening Sunday, March 29, 2015 from 4-9PM

CENTRAL FINE presents Ant’s Tits, Tomm El-Saieh’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition title refers to a Haitian proverb that indicates: with patience, one can see an ant’s tits. Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince in 1984. As a child he studied painting and trained with local painters in the area, understanding rhythm, color, and pattern as structural forces that have the potential to charge a surface beyond the visual. He observed narratives in the works of his teachers, that ranged from the religious and the political to the touristic. Growing up in Haiti as the son of a Haitian-Palestine father and an Israeli mother, El-Saieh faced a sense of removal from his societal experience in Port-au-Prince, a removal that enhanced the perception that one could be part of a pertinent group while not fully participating in it. As he points out: “I cannot talk for Haitians, or Israelis or Palestinians. I need to address those backgrounds from a place of neutrality, from a place of abstraction. I need to look at those conflicting grounds and understand them as political and pictorial backgrounds in tension.” Eventually, this looking at the look of things became a defining aspect in El-Saieh’s body of work. When addressing the look of traditional Haitian painting (identifiable by dots and marks, color, rhythm and over-determination in paint application) and eliminating any trace of narrative content, he concentrates on the possibilities of that very state of removal/abstraction that is lived as intrinsic.

In the “Ant’s Tits” paintings, what is clear is that traditional Haitian flat color application has been replaced by a superimposition of transparencies and that narratives are cancelled by a stream of marks or punctuations that overlap and present all-over surfaces, all-over points of view in a dry and specific way, retaining a highly meditative vibe as if painted in a trance.

Those transparencies, might also be read as a set of integrated and yet independent ways of addressing states of conflict, race, voodoo, or say, nations and their idiosyncrasies, tensions, colors, etc.—all acting as interdependent filters that take into account their self-reflective capacity.

Abstraction, as it its understood by Modernism is largely missing in the history of Haitian painting. And this gap moved El-Saieh to develop a critical approach to the term and its manifestation in his works, an approach that somehow updates Haitian painting’s tradition and look while investigating attention as a major focus or drive, a concept that is researched by many of his contemporaries. We can say that, right now, this vantage point is evident when zooming into things, or is compulsively embodied in the attempt to observe and try to see the ant’s tits.

Moreover, today, the notion of attention seems to constantly redefine itself as a generational symptom driven by an extreme focus and a scattered or all-encompassing scope. An enhanced emphasis on observation, at once diagnosed as ADHD and all-over-the place, perhaps signals attention as a currency, and this currency is one that insists on placing itself as a link within the links that we upload and inhabit.

One can also say that an ADHD wandering eye and its chemical-induced focus retain a level of ambivalence towards the notions of time, speed and space, and re-engage through a liberation from the burden of progress. In that sense, modernist aspirations for progress and the ineffable are now scattered: fast/slow and Adderall-fueled modes of image production-consumption with an emphasis on the generic or the decentralized. What emerges then is a type of abstraction, one that retains a degree of specificity and fluidity that allows for transparencies to affect each other, slow down, or speed each other up. And this insistence is one of the elements that Tomm El-Saieh brings forward in his meticulous paintings.

It seems to me that Tomm’s interest in fabric design and patterns, t-shirts, pointillism, all-over abstraction, Haitian-ness, or his grandfather’s voodoo-jazz orchestra all converge to present a politically charged merging of sorts while considering attention as a currency, firmly floating over the ant’s armor, scanning it and detecting its tits.

Diego Singh, Port au Prince, 2015.

Tomm El Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1984. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami and currently directs the El-Saieh Gallery in Haiti. He recently curated a group exhibition titled The Look at Gucci Vuitton, Miami; and Above the Ground, at El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince. El-Saieh presented a solo exhibition at the Haitian Heritage Center, Miami in 2008. Ant’s Tits at CENTRAL FINE is his first solo exhibition. El-Saieh’s paintings will be included in an upcoming group exhibition presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.