CENTRAL FINE

Tomm El-Saieh. Parachute

April 2nd-April 27th, 2023

Opening April 2nd 6-8 pm

Tomm El-Saieh’s Parachute alludes to various leaps of faith. Years ago, when El-Saieh decided to move on from figuration and bypass the narratives expected from Haitian painters, a jump into abstraction implied that naming wouldn’t anchor his practice. 

Perhaps, this interest in what we call abstraction was informed by El-Saieh’s refugee status, as a child, and his encounter with a new language, societal norms, etc. One could say that in art and immigration there’s a discovery of new forms and formats, as one’s body, color, and speech become political on foreign ground. The artist and the immigrant must adapt to a set of codes, boundaries, and frameworks. One never feels completely at home, and an aerial viewpoint inevitably takes control of the mind. The distortion of the past and the urgency of the present, forces the artist and the immigrant to invent a lexicon that erases and affirms every mark on their bodies, which become bodies of work, addressing time under incredible pressure. In Parachute the act of preparing oneself for a fall, resisting gravity, and seeking shelter against speed, appears as an abstraction. Maybe, art could be thought of as a parachute, acting as a mediator between the subconscious and the real —in El-Saieh’s case, paintings.  

In this presentation, forms expand, evoking fractals, growing into larger structures, signaling a departure from previous bodies of work, where shapes and markings remained contained in smaller clusters. El-Saieh nourishes his vocabulary by incessantly re-working every inch of the canvas, until a million paintings appear to be contained within one large system, that never stops growing.

Diego Singh, Miami Beach, 2023

Tomm El-Saieh was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1984.

He has presented institutional solo exhibitions at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, curated by Robert Wiesenberger; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 2017-2018; curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Stephanie Seidel.

El-Saieh held solo presentations at Luhring Augustine Bushwick in 2020, and Luhring Augustine Chelsea, in 2021; as well as solo presentations at CENTRAL FINE Miami Beach, in 2015, 2018-2019.

Recently, El-Saieh’s work was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach; de la Cruz Collection, Miami, among others. El-Saieh’s work was included in The New Museum Triennial, Songs for Sabotage (2018) curated by Alex Gartenfeld and Gary Carrion-Murayari, among others. El Saieh’s work is part of the permanent collection of the ICA Miami; Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), among many others.

Tomm El-Saieh has organized exhibitions at numerous international venues, as well as through his family’s intergenerational and eponymous gallery in Port-au-Prince. El-Saieh will participate in a group presentation at Gagosian, London; in the summer of 2023.