The viewer is unsure, by design.
Ali Saif's paintings are his response to the visual chaos that confronts us in everyday life. He starts with black and white paint and then adds and subtracts colors and shapes. As the surface is worked and reworked many times, the layers build to create an environment filled with visual passageways that lead the viewer through a never-ending series of discoveries - many of them presenting a contradictory sense of time and space that asks the viewer to accept day for night and night for day.
The term "day for night" refers to a filmmaking method, where a combination of underexposure and a shift in hue allows for shooting what appear to be nighttime scenes during broad daylight. Most viewers never catch on to this visual trick, but once you do, you can never unsee it. Oddly, even with this understanding, we tend to put reason aside and submit to the perception that what we're seeing on screen is actually happening at night.
In Saif's work, while we may see a darkened scene, the blacks are not pure but rather contain greens and blues that provide interest and texture. Colors pop like neon, and we see trails of light as if from a time-lapse exposure, but we also see windows in which it seems we are looking into a day-lit room.
Conversely, Saif sometimes washes a darkly wrought image with translucent white, producing a seemingly day-lit field intensely layered with varying depth and color saturation, and from which ghostly figures sometimes emerge. In this variation, the windows we're peering into contain scenes more readily understood in the context of deep dusk.
The disorientation is delightful.
