Apply Gently - Nour El-Saleh
According to Voltaire if you 'Ask the devil he will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail'. It’s a thought that so quickly changes your vantage point leaving you with mild whiplash and an empathy for something that supposedly represents all evil.
In Apply Gently your preconceptions are equally flipped on their head by this world of strange rituals where insects meld with fleshy beings and you’re not sure who’s prey and who’s predator. But this world isn’t so different from our own, the people, almost human, and environments soaked deep in references from half-forgotten ceremonies and moments of intimacy we've taken part in. It is this push and pull between reality and fiction that allows simultaneously a sharp knife to be pointed at the ridiculousness of our world and to fall back and wallow in fertile ground of this visionary landscape.
in “Scope Creep” a half-naked figure served up on a plate straddles a fish between two gluttonous mouths hanging open. In her hand reaching back she holds an immaculate miniature vision, a box enclosing two figures is encrusted with symbols. Does she offer it to satisfy the diner's unrelenting appetite or is she in fact the star of the show receiving applause and providing essential nourishment for this ecosystem. Could this not be an allegory of the creative process and its audience, the artist depending on others when the work leaves the studio and the audience needing the artist to explore parts of themselves that they can't, to create meaning in their life. This ambivalent power dynamic offers us no clear resolution but we must watch as it seems to repeat itself in the ecosystem of the painting. looking closer at the vitrine the figures are closed off from the outside world while a plant feeds them or depends on them for survival, its unclear. The small paintings on the boxes base evoke a predella, scenes painted at the bottom of altarpieces with different narratives from the main image. This seems to talk of the way art might feed off itself, draw from hollowed images, a church being built on an earlier spiritual site, like a hermit crab slipping into someone else's shell.
There is a funny point in the Ben Lerner book 'Leaving the Atocha Station' when the protagonist realizes during a terrible poetry reading, that how emotionally moved everyone is, is due more to their desperation to believe in the potential power of experiences of art than any reality happening in front of them. Nour draws attention to this need for meaning and retelling of narrative in her ecosystem which chimes with our own culture.
In “The Martyr of Blue-Sky Suburbia”, a single figure dominates the composition, looking world weary, emerging from her bog like backdrop. Her hollow nipples deviate from our own, picking at our sense of the uncanny. Here different evolutionary forces have created these, yet the strangeness only clears the ground for the acceptance of unexpected forms the body can take. The figure's hand harbours a stigmata like flesh wound, that is thought to have miraculously appeared on particularly pious saints hands to echo the wounds of Christ. But here the figure slides its finger inside as a drop of blood oozes out in an almost masturbatory action of self-pity or self-punishment. The idea that this devout lifestyle might have repercussions on your actual body conjures up its unruliness and yet how this type of wound is the highest mark of spirituality. Again, an allegory lurks, as a spirit like face springs up from the hand, could this be a poet leaking inspiration, who pushes their mental perhaps even physical limits and indulges in this mark of devotion to their achievements? This image has an ambivalence that pervades the show, you’re not sure whether to pity or celebrate, to read it as a timeless stock figure or a person rooted in our present dressed in costume.
Throughout the show your relationship as viewer to this created world is toyed with, are you participant or are you observer? The title of the show, Apply Gently, draws from instruction manuals or rule systems, put in place to help or control us when we use a product. The manual produced for the work “Continuity Mechanism” deliberately makes you a participant, however only under certain conditions as thought the world inside is to be treated with great care and its interpretation, a dangerous game. Thomas more's book, Utopia allowed 16th century Europe to gaze back on itself through a fictitious piece of travel writing from another world of the utopian people. It was printed with a map and an alphabet apparently belonging to these people, playing with reality, delighting in world building and fooling some readers in the process. In the same way Nour's world allows us to suspend our disbelief and let the condition of this ecosystem wash over us so that we might more closely look at our own. In “Discounted Gratification” a ceremonial race is run around a track that stretches across a dry plane as a crowd and monumental humanoid creature look on. But on closer inspection in the upper part of the painting sits a fly. Is it on the surface or does it sit almost human sized on the dry ground? Does it draw on the rotten history of still life, where death is never far away, pointing at the foolishness of pride in winning the race in the face of mortality. Or does it pretend to inhabit our space of the gallery and draw attention to the flatness of the canvas. Elsewhere on the surface of “Continuity Mechanism”, a slippage takes place between the act of painting and the depicted figures in this world, as drips from the thin washed down oil paint form the flowing hair of creatures lounging in by the waterside. These tricks play with our relationship to this depicted world, pulling us and pushing us away, making us pay attention as observers of this and our own world.
Essay by Robert Carter
Nour el Saleh (born 1997, Lebanon) completed her postgraduate degree from The Royal Drawing School in 2022 and her undergraduate degree from the Slade school of Fine Art in 2019. She has recently exhibited at Edel Assanti, UK (2022), Castello di San Basillio, Italy (2022), Cassina Projects, Italy (2022); Plaza Plaza, UK (2021), V.O Curations, UK (2021); Lowell Ryan Projects, Mexico (2020); Kuva Gallery, Finland (2019); Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London (2018). She was recently in residence at Castello San Basilio, Italy and Palazzo Monti, Italy. In 2023, Nour will be exhibiting at Quench, in Margate, UK (2023). El Saleh lives and works in London.
