Luhring Augustine is pleased to present four extraordinary new paintings by Haitian-born, Miami-based painter Tomm El-Saieh in the fifth installment of The Pleasure Pavilion. The ongoing series of installations on view in our Bushwick location brings together artists from the gallery program in dialogue with an Indian pleasure pavilion from the late 18th or early 19th century.
Tomm El-Saieh's dense and rhythmic paintings derive inspiration from myriad sources, including American and international abstraction, as well as Haitian Voodoo 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 from this meticulous process are at once sublime and sensual, mystical and direct, chaotic and restrained.