I’ve seen too many paintings to remember most of them. By now, my eyes, trained in habit, skim brushstrokes the way others scroll through headlines with casual admiration and detached awe. I file things into categories like compositionally strong, or aesthetically interesting, but rarely do I feel pierced. And then, a few nights ago, a painting caught me in the middle of my evening ‘numb-scrolling’ through Pinterest. The painting arrived at me like a whisper you’re not sure you heard. Its image instantly invoked what I’ve been feeling lately — feeling crammed by comfort. When I first saw this piece, I had an odd sense of release, and relief despite the painting’s imagery of discomfort.
I tried finding the name of this piece, but to no avail — my search didn’t yield any results. However, one of the millions of lovely Pinterest users, shared in the comment section that the artist was Safwan Dahoul. It’s quite a beautiful thing that someone can identify your work without any given details, particularly when it’s as subtly powerful as Dahoul’s cubist pieces.
Neat package
Set against a light beige backdrop that resembles papyrus paper, a colorless couch holds a woman crammed between its arms. She doesn’t look like she was placed there, as the couch looks as if she has grown inside of it. The lines used for the couch are sharp, and lack imperfections except the lines on the left side of the chair at the top of her right shoulder down to where her head is located, you can see a bit of curvature. Similar to how you see a person’s imprint in a couch, or plush piece of furniture for a prolonged period of time after they get out of it.
Although this painting doesn’t have any natural elements, it reminds me of vines, and fungi, how nature grows and intertwines with the physical elements around it.
Maybe Safwan wanted the woman to not be a symbol of an object, but rather the object itself fuses into the woman’s being. Just as the sofa chair here fuses into the papyrus backdrop — giving it this timeless yet punctual feel. How long has the woman been laying in this chair? Has it been recent or longer? Is the couch molding to her body or is she conforming to the shape of the couch?
I also noticed the woman’s nudity, and her cramped, fetal-like position. Her overwhelming size in contrast to the chair makes me wonder if Dahoul intended to portray a woman who has outgrown her surroundings. Alternatively, she might be engaging in self-infantilization, attempting to comfort herself by shrinking to fit into an unnatural or unsuitable space.
The colors used in the piece aren’t the most striking. It’s only shades of brown — varying from the light beige of the backdrop to the charred palette of browns in the woman’s pigment.
How long has the woman been laying in this chair? Has it been recent or longer? Is the couch molding to her body or is she conforming to the shape of the couch?
It’s worth noting how the color of the woman is the most profound out of the whole painting. Her body, painted in the deepest registers of brown, from burnt umber to raw sienna to something that might be called the color of old wood, or dried blood, or the earth after rain, curves into the embrace of a sofa that seems to breathe with her lungs.
Dahoul masterfully employs dark brown acrylics, transforming the woman into a chiaroscuro prism. Her skin pigment seemingly bleeds into the colorless sofa chair, giving it depth and warmth.
One can also see the contrast of darker hues on her body that almost looks black in different parts, almost as if a void is swallowing her whole. On another hand, I suspect the multiple brown pigments that form her body aren’t just artistic choices but fragments. Maybe she is a crowd of women pressed into one exhausted pose. Or maybe each pigment is a version of her — pre-chair, post-chair, the ghost of her mid-morph.
Another thing that stood out to me was the exaggerated two dimensional look of the painting. It reminds me of a flatten parcel box after you’ve taken the items out of it and decide to repurpose it. If you look closely, and long enough, you start to see the image look as if you are looking over the woman inside of a box(invisible that is). Safwan gives this overhead view instead of figures we can see at a straight angle. After more time gazing, the whole painting started to look smushed as if someone just came by, and stepped on the woman and the chair.
To reiterate, the chair looks like it’s fusing into the backdrop itself, just as the woman here appears to be fusing into the chair. Looking at it from this angle, it piques the question of; was the woman placed here willfully or did she come along with the couch in a neat package?
Woman as chair
Upon looking at the painting, it reminded me of an eerie internet clip from the short film ‘Tôkyô!’ that shows a woman literally turning into a chair.
The backstory of this clip is Hiroko (the woman in the clip) awakens with a hole in her chest, which expands as her body transforms into an inanimate chair. Initially unnoticed by passersby, she reverts to human form when a man tries to take her home, fleeing nude before transforming back into a chair at a bus station. Hiroko discovers she can only be human when unseen. She strategically places herself as a chair, is taken in by a musician, and later writes a farewell letter to her lover as his filmmaking career begins.
There’s horror here in this piece too, but quiet, like mold growing behind a wall. A kind of body horror, where literal boundaries blur. Where woman becomes thing. She’s not even objectified — but absorbed. Still, there is a possibility:
- What if she chose this fusion?
- What if she learned to camouflage so well that the environment cannot tell the difference between her and itself?
- What if this merging is a strategy, not a submission?
But there is something else here, something that resists my attempts to read this only as tragedy. In her folding, I also see a kind of strategy. She has contorted herself into a question mark, a puzzle that the eye cannot easily solve. Her facial expression is neutral and almost unreadable. Her interior life is protected by the fortress of her own limbs. This is camouflage, but also appears to be a choice. Safwan has chosen her to be both present and absent, to occupy the space while maintaining the mystery of her occupancy.
Maybe Safwan wanted the woman to not be a symbol of an object, but rather the object itself fuses into the woman’s being.
The chair, this sofa, becomes a threshold. It is the space where public and private collapse into each other, where the body that must be seen becomes the body that chooses how to be seen. In domestic spaces, women have always been expected to be like furniture — decorative, functional, expected to support the weight of others’ comfort. But she has inverted this logic. She has made the furniture part of her body, claimed its capacity to hold and be held, transformed the tool of her oppression into the architecture of her resistance.
I think of my grandmama, who could fall asleep in any chair, who had learned to rest while remaining alert, who knew how to disappear into the upholstery while keeping one ear open for the sound of someone needing her.
I think of the way women’s bodies become extensions of the spaces they tend, how their boundaries grow porous with use. How we learn to offer ourselves as comfort even when we are deserving of comfort as well.
Brown
Moreover, another way to look at this is that Dahoul could be showing us how we tether ourselves to possessions, spaces, and environments that don’t fit us and vice versa.
Living in a state of not growing, but mutating, and becoming something that doesn’t mirror our original nature. Speaking of nature once more, this could be why Safwan used shades of brown in his piece — as brown is universally associated with earthiness and the ancient world — a pastime that has now mutated into fractured three-dimensional pixels.
On another hand, I suspect the multiple brown pigments that form her body aren’t just artistic choices but fragments. Maybe she is a crowd of women pressed into one exhausted pose. Or maybe each pigment is a version of her — pre-chair, post-chair, the ghost of her mid-morph
The brown of her skin, the brown of the sofa, the brown of the earth that holds us all — these are the colors of endurance, of things that last not by resisting change but by changing slowly, deeply, with the patience of seasons. She is teaching me something about time, about the way survival happens in the accumulation of moments. That this isn’t a dramatic gesture but the quiet persistence of remaining, of finding a way to rest even in positions that were designed to make rest impossible.
Comfort
As I mentioned earlier, upon my first impression of this piece, I had a bolt of energy that ran down my chest to my stomach, and then this ten second window of release. Despite the imagery in the painting, I instinctively thought about comfort, but comfort that becomes uncomfortable. Lately, I’ve been craving movement, new surroundings, and new muses.
I’m grateful for my own apartment, my means of shelter, however working from home, and having little to no social life makes my place look like the wallpaper in the painting. So familiar, so bland, that it bends right in, into everything else.
I’ve worked hard to live on my own, and afford creature comforts at a young age. Yet, this place aches as gums do from an empty smile. Each day goes by I feel my body become larger than everything in here, pushing against a ceiling that I should be grateful for. Four walls wrap around me, and I’m not sure if it’s caress or protest to get me to leave.
Leave? And go where? Where does Dereka fit? What is my true nature? Where can I grow without amputated roots?
This is the soft horror of the everyday. The violence of stillness, of sitting very still while the world shapes itself around you. Becoming so familiar with your position that you forget you ever had the choice to stand.
I do not know the name of this painting. Maybe it has none. Maybe names, like chairs, are just another shape we are told to fit ourselves into. And maybe this time, the woman is reshaping it from the inside out.
Thank you for reading this piece of my soul. Please check out Safwan Dahoul and more of his works here. If you would like to read more of my essays and poetry, follow and subscribe to my Medium here. You can find me on Instagram as well @dsmithwrites.
D.Smith Writes 