File Note 136: Zeinab Saleh

In their 1998 single ‘Softest Place on Earth’, the ’90s R&B foursome Xscape sang of a ‘new horizon of love’, their syrupy harmonies fluttering over a lush bed of instrumentation. Beyond the sheen of midnight skies and stylistic lullabies, theirs was a soundtrack of shimmering desire. R&B resonates as both genre and register, revelling in the excessively and unabashedly impassioned. It luxuriates in the intimacy of incense-swathed hallways, pattering rain, soft lighting and honeyed tones. Like genre, intimacy is a contested threshold. Often shiveringly fleeting, it is a thread of relation that is always at the risk of unravelling. Much like grasping at tendrils of smoke, capturing its mutable nature can be a daunting task. Maddeningly vital, its latticework of crisscrossing affiliations influences the direction of our lives. Zeinab Saleh’s paintings are keenly attuned to these movements. Born in Kenya, Saleh is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose
work confronts the quiet power of intimacy in daily life’s rhythms. Her new show, Softest place (on earth), shares its title and sensibilities with the best of R&B classics; its affect arrives in waves, lapping against
thematic constraints. The unspoken reverberates; other, softer worlds remain uncharted. Saleh traces the shadow’s linger, the curl of eyelash, the wisp of light, the candle’s drip. These paintings do the work of
excavation, as sociality simmers under their surface. They are fluid in their emotional resonance.

To intimate is to make known, to elucidate the silhouette and pin down the impermanent. The late Lauren Berlant referred to the ‘sparest of signs and gestures’ at the root of intimacy, insisting upon the limitless possibilities of intimacy as an ‘aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way’.¹ Intimacy energises. Saleh’s paintings nod to the rippling significance of the gestural, commanding what she calls a ‘lexicon of eyes and hands’. This intimacy of stolen glances and snatched moments recalls the sumptuous emotional candour of the R&B music video, with its visual vernacular of crackling fireplaces, soaked shirts and open-armed surrender.

Softness is not just a place. It is an orientation towards one’s surroundings and peoples. Still waters run deep. This ethos saturates Saleh’s work. I am held by the mirrored gaze of How many ways
(2021), which renders the simmering stillness of self-recognition while conveying slippages of imagination. It is as malleable as the titular Toni Braxton song. The beguilingly serpentine reappears in My body drops an octave (2021), where the transition of removed charcoal into black lines forms the winding motif of a snake. Arabesque patterns flourish in unanticipated corners, lending a sense of the otherworldly
to these meditations. Elsewhere, there is the suggestive dreaminess of dewdrops (Last night’s dew, 2021), fading evenings and the curved necks of swans (Moonlit Lake, 2021). The crescent moon hangs evocatively in Preparing my daughter for rain (2021), a piece titled after a Key Ballah poetry collection ⁴. (Ballah detailed her own arithmetic of what grows between the cracks of skin: ‘cell by cell, over nine full moons, a flower grown from blood’.) Saleh’s engagement with the poetic further extends to the experimental quality of her method. Space and shade offer opportunities for quick-handed improvisation, a challenge with which poets are all too familiar. The more you look, the more you notice. Doubt is a visitation of humility. In the poem ‘Night Is Her Robe’, Grace Nichols centres the quiveringly alert subject with a penchant for moonlight and strange weeds ⁵. She is both witness and alchemist. Saleh’s works step out softly, ‘leaving the edge of her island forest’. This teetering balance of perception can be seen in Rising Moon (2021), Saleh’s study of a henna-tattooed hand and the slickness of a cat’s back. At first, I did not spot the cat. Like intimacy, looking
takes practice.

In her allegiance to the monochrome, there is a deceptive simplicity to Saleh’s latest works. The realm of the intimate is so flighty, so susceptible to fickle exposition and stiff, soul-sapping analysis. Between the public and private spheres, so much of it is spectacularised, exploited and evacuated of meaning. By focusing on
the richness of inner lives, practised domesticities and transcendent abstractions, Saleh adamantly honours it. Resisting fixed narratives, she clears an unrestricted path ahead. At one point, she told me she was drawn to ‘moments of tenderness’ wherever she may find them. Saleh’s work invites us to retrace our steps and invigorate our attentiveness towards what binds us. The wondrously mundane is magnified alongside the ethereal. Both can transform us, if we let them.