Safwan Dahoul: The Eye, and the architecture of a room that keeps shrinking

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 9 min

For nearly four decades Safwan Dahoul has painted the same subject, and most writing about it describes a woman. It is at least as accurate to say he has been painting a room. In this exhibition the room finally closes, and three small wooden objects prove it.

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The Eye: An Aperture Into the Soul, at Ayyam Gallery in Dubai from 16 May to 4 July 2026, was described in almost every notice it received as a study in confinement, solitude and psychological compression. All of that is true, and there is more to say, because those words have travelled with Safwan Dahoul‘s work for so long that they now sit alongside something more specific.

The more precise observation is structural. Dahoul builds pictures the way a designer resolves a small floor plan. There is a volume, there is a body, and the entire drama of the painting is the fit between them. Change the volume and everything else follows: the posture of the figure, the direction of the light, the amount of air, whether the eye can look out or only be looked into.

That is what changed here. The volume got smaller. And in three of the smallest works in the show, it stopped being depicted and became actual.

The Dream series was always a building problem

Dahoul was born in Hama in 1961, studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus, and then took a doctorate at the Higher Institute of Plastic Arts in Mons, Belgium. He returned to teach in Damascus and became one of the most consequential mentors in that art school, which is part of why his influence in Syrian painting runs wider than his own canvases.

He began the Dream series in the late 1980s and has continued it ever since, numbering the works rather than titling them. His stated sources are Picasso’s Cubism and ancient Assyrian and Pharaonic art, and both show, but they show in a specific way that is worth naming. Cubism gave him permission to bend a body to fit a plane rather than the other way round. Ancient Near Eastern relief gave him the frontal, compressed, shallow space where a figure sits inside a boundary rather than in front of a background.

Put those two together and you do not get a painter of moods. You get a painter with a set of construction rules: shallow depth, a hard edge, a body deformed to meet that edge, and a monochrome palette of grey, black and muted white that removes colour as a variable so that proportion has to do all the work.

The monochrome is usually read as melancholy. It is at least as much a technical decision. Take colour out and the only things left to modulate are edge, value and interval, which is to say the same tools an architect has in a section drawing. Dahoul has been drawing sections of interior life for thirty five years.

In 2026 the room became a box

The change in this body of work is stated plainly in the gallery’s own text by the critic William Kaprielian, who describes the sparse interior compressing into a confined, box-like space in which the figure’s confinement no longer permits it to open outwards into the world as it once could.

Look at what that means as a plan. In the earlier Dream paintings the interior was sparse but generous. Sometimes several figures occupied it, and there was slack in the space, room for a limb to extend, a boundary that was legible but not pressing. The tension came from the fact that the figure chose not to move.

In the new work there is no slack. The chamber tightens to the body’s outline. The figure folds inward, knees drawn, spine curved, and the posture is no longer a choice but an accommodation to the dimensions available. The body becomes a site of compression that echoes the constraint around it.

This is a meaningful shift, and it is not a mood change. It is a change of brief. A room a person can move within and a room a person is fitted into are different design problems, and they produce different bodies. The painting has gone from interior to enclosure.

Three objects, five centimetres deep

The proof sits in the smallest works in the exhibition, and they are the ones that repay a deliberate pause.

Dream 242, Dream 243 and Dream 244, all 2025, are not paintings on canvas. They are mixed media on wood, each measuring 17 by 13 by 5 centimetres. That third dimension is the point. These are objects with a depth, and the depth is five centimetres.

For an artist whose entire practice is about how much room a figure has, making a physical thing five centimetres deep is not a change of format. It is the argument restated in the actual world. The compression in the large canvases is illusionistic; a viewer agrees to read a flat surface as a tight room. In the wooden works there is no agreement required, because the shallow space is measurable. You could put a ruler on it.

There is a lineage here worth drawing out, and it runs back to the same ancient sources Dahoul cites. A shallow rectangular wooden object holding a compressed frontal figure is, formally, a votive plaque. It sits in the hand. It is the scale of something carried rather than something visited.

That has consequences for how the show reads. The large canvases, one of which measures 200 by 420 centimetres, are architectural in the ordinary sense: a body at or beyond life size, a surface that fills peripheral vision, an encounter you stand in front of. The small works are the opposite. They ask for the distance of a held object, roughly a forearm’s length. Running both in one room means the exhibition asks a visitor to change their own body position twice, and that oscillation between standing back and leaning in is the strongest piece of exhibition design in the show.

Why the eye, and why the ancient reference is not decoration

Exhibition titles about eyes and souls carry a lot of weight. This one earns it, and the reference behind it repays following back.

Dahoul cites ancient Assyrian art, and the ancient Near Eastern eye is one of the most deliberate design devices in the history of sculpture. The votive figures excavated at Tell Asmar, dating from roughly 2900 to 2600 BCE, stand with hands clasped and eyes enlarged far beyond natural proportion, inlaid with shell, black limestone and lapis lazuli. The scholar Irene Winter has argued that the exaggeration encodes the worshipper’s devotion in physical form: the wide eye is the mechanism by which the figure projects itself outward toward its god. Earlier still, the Eye Temple at Tell Brak produced hundreds of small alabaster idols reduced to almost nothing but eyes.

The ancient eye, in other words, is an outward device. It is how a stationary body reaches somewhere it cannot walk to.

Dahoul reverses it, and the reversal is the exhibition. His figures cannot project outward, because the room will not allow it. Kaprielian’s text is precise on this: the eye becomes the sole gateway through which the interior can come into view. It is no longer a channel out. It is an aperture in, and an aperture is a hole in a wall.

That reframes the title as an architectural term rather than a poetic one. Once the room has closed, the eye is the only opening left in it, and the show tracks what happens to that opening across a series of works. In some the eye is luminous, holding. In others it is exhausted, the light in it almost spent. Read as a sequence, the paintings chart the performance of a single remaining aperture under load, which is a more interesting subject than sadness.

The building these paintings hang in

There is an accident of place worth drawing out, because it doubles the argument.

Ayyam Gallery was founded in 2006 in Damascus by Khaled and Jouhayna Samawi, and, with Hisham Samawi, it became the first gallery to take a warehouse in Al Quoz on what is now Alserkal Avenue, at a point when the area was not commercially zoned for it. That is a real piece of urban design history, whatever else it is. A gallery district that now anchors Dubai’s contemporary art calendar began with a decision to occupy an industrial shed that the planning framework had not yet imagined as a cultural building.

Then the Syrian war came, and the gallery moved its centre of gravity to Dubai, relocating around twenty to twenty five Syrian artists, their families, and in excess of twenty two thousand works of art out of Damascus over roughly three years.

So the paintings about enclosure and the impossibility of leaving hang in a converted warehouse that exists because a group of people successfully left, taking an entire body of work with them. Dahoul is one of the artists that infrastructure was built to hold. Neither fact explains the other, but standing in unit B11 with both in mind changes the temperature of the work, and it is the kind of context that sits behind a press release rather than inside it.

Where the work keeps moving

A series sustained for close to four decades earns a question about signature, and the answer here is a strong one. The monochrome palette, the numbering, the recurring female figure and the shallow chamber have become instantly identifiable, and that identifiability is hard won. In the large canvases the compression reads as a move the painter has complete command of, landed cleanly every time.

The further evidence is the small work, and it is decisive. The wooden pieces, and the experimental small-scale figures that first appeared in Dahoul’s institutional exhibition at START Museum in Shanghai in November 2025, are where the practice is visibly still thinking. They are looser and more exploratory, which is exactly their value. An artist who can still make something new at sixty five is not repeating himself.

Ayyam Gallery’s Dubai programme continues in September 2026 with Hisham Sharif’s Allusive Veil, his first solo exhibition in the UAE. Sharif works the same question of interior and enclosure from the opposite direction to Dahoul, building dense, patterned rooms rather than stripping them back to a single line.

The other pleasure is curatorial rather than artistic. Hanging four-metre canvases and hand-sized objects in one space is the right instinct, and it asks the small pieces to be met on their own terms. Given that attention rather than read as footnotes to the big work, they carry the exhibition’s best idea.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this exhibition is the one about grief, and it is not wrong. Dahoul’s subject has been displacement and endurance for as long as he has been numbering these pictures, and a Syrian painter working in Dubai does not need the connection spelled out.

The version worth keeping is smaller and harder. A painter set himself a spatial problem in the late 1980s, and rather than solve it and move on he has spent thirty five years adjusting one variable, which is how much room the body is given. In 2026 he reduced it to almost nothing, and then made three objects five centimetres deep to show he meant it.

Whatever else that is, it is a designer’s discipline: one brief, held for decades, tested by changing a single dimension at a time.