With loose, expressive brushwork and a tendency to hide what it’s all about — yet an inclination to reveal everything — his compositions convey cryptic emotional states more than their physical exactitude ever could, tugging obliquely at our senses. Once applied with deliberation, a smear may be buried or exhumed: El Haitout privileges subtraction over addition, consecrating obliteration and concealment as punctuations that disclose the currents coursing through him. “Painting is difficult. No gesture is gratuitous.” This deliberate paucity of narrative specificity is a hallmark of his work: a mnestic articulation without narrative coercion, indifferent to arc or finality. His compositions resist haste, yielding their secrets solely to sustained attention and engagement; each quadro a culmination and inception, a seed whose gestation informs the next, creating a lattice of interdependent paintings.

Yet his compositions are far from univocal. They engage in an anachronistic pas de deux with their own philosophical treatise — straddling both the aphoristic and the expressive, mute and loquacious all at once. Balancing a scholarly grounding in philosophy and psychology with erudite research into the legibility of color as a sensorial vector, El Haitout cultivates an idiosyncratic practice — even if one is tempted to compare him to Francis Bacon or Peter Doig, whose influence feels internalized rather than mimicked.