Transient Curated is pleased to present In Absence Of ___, a series of eleven artworks by Ayla El-Moussa.
Ayla resists easy categorization as photographer, model, digital painter, or surreal artist, yet across these methods, her subjects remain constant: nature,the ocean, the human mind, and the female body. Her earlier works tended toward the panoramic, revealing the full image and with it, the full story. In 2023 she began moving in the other direction, abstracting, withholding, pulling the viewer inwards.
In Absence Of ___ continues that shift. The works echo the Rückenfigur of Romantic painting, the solitary figure seen from behind, absorbed into landscape, but El-Moussa borrows the movement's canvas texture too, laying it under her digital compositions. The result sits deliberately between mediums: not quite photograph, not quite painting, but entirely itself.
The seams are visible by design. Figures are cut with rough edges, as though lifted by a magic wand tool or a crude chroma key green screen effect. The exposed mechanics of image-making become part of the image and a key narrative in the “dissolution of self”. But there is nothing accidental about this, it is completely instinctive.
"For the first time I'm making artworks without research," El-Moussa has said. "I haven't done deep dives into the past. I've really created these from a place of uncomfortable feeling. But I don’t want to over-intellectualize it all".
In Absence Of ___ marks a new register for the artist, quieter, more interior, but more exposed. And yet, for the attentive viewer, the faintest suggestion of a wave moves through the canvas texture. Or maybe it’s just a brushstroke.
About the Artist
Ayla El-Moussa is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, digital painting, moving image, and hand-applied materials, El-Moussa constructs what she calls a digital alchemy, a visual philosophy governed by elemental forces: water, the body, the wave, formlessness & abstraction, gold, silver. At its heart is a sustained reimagining of the artist-muse relationship — the creator who is also the subject, the observer who is also the observed, the image that reveals itself only to those who look long enough.
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