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. This deliberate paucity of narrative specificity is a hallmark of his work: an articulation of sensation 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 emotive 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.