Surprise Bouquet

Nour el Saleh’s new exhibition begins with an examination of cycles relating to stillness, loss or renewal and the quiet forces that move us through them. Her paintings trace the shifting phases of daily life, where every beginning carries its ending and repetition is both a comfort and a burden. Quick euphoric starts, slow stagnant ends: her work charts the inevitability of change but also the persistence of what remains. The rhythm of morning, afternoon and night offers one framework. Morning arrives as clarity and urgency, a private time when the body feels lit from within and its opacity briefly undone. Afternoon carries turbulence, the churn of memory, the heaviness of worry. It is the unsolvable time when every act feels subject to risk assessment, stability is somewhat provisional. Night slows the pace but brings uncertainty: sleep as departure, returning altered, never quite the same. This temporal cycle reappears through motifs that shift in meaning with context. Most notably the bouquet. Flowers signify celebration, condolence, ritual, apology. Always laden with intention yet never stable. They appear embroidered on cushions, painted by a mother’s hand, stamped on a hospital gown. Fresh arrangements radiate optimism while wilted bouquets gather in stagnant water, their neglect as eloquent as their bloom. Beauty and decay remain inseparable, each foreshadowing the other. El Saleh’s works inhabit this duality. Patterns emerge only to dissolve; loops bring both recognition and suffocation. They stage the simultaneity of heaven and hell, pollination and rot, the oscillation between mud and light. Renewal requires shedding, but renewal never resolves. Her paintings capture the restless hum of this state: the buzz in the head, the moment of quiet that is rarely reached, the mind circling in its own loops of thought. At the centre of the exhibition lies a puzzle: 289 possible variations with no definitive answer. Some solutions may look more elegant or logical, but none are final. To stop at one is to stop playing. This puzzle becomes a metaphor for both painting and life itself - a constant repositioning, a negotiation between order and flux. El Saleh does not search for resolution so much as to dwell in instability. Her paintings hold viewers in that unresolved space, where memory, sensation, and symbolism overlap without clean division. They remind us that cycles are not linear progressions but endless returns. To inhabit them is not futility, but a condition of being human. Between the mud and the light, between morning’s rush and night’s dissolution, el Saleh locates her subject of the fragile and unpredictable loops through which existence unfolds.