Madam! Be careful with your hands. Keep your legs together in a way they won't extrude my composition. This is not a stage. It's only a bench and a chair. Don't worry about how you look. Smile, or cry if you wish. You may even close your eyes. That would be also fine. You shall see with your eyes shut. Here, the objects are all staring at you, at this very moment. Don't speak a word if you don't want to but let this moment last forever. This is not an ordinary sofa. It wouldn't fit easily to just any living room. Its width is as the width of life is and its length, well you decide. You can grow taller while you are sitting, nothing shall happen. Unlike Elaheh Heidari's previous paintings in the Chairs series, this time in Around Objects, 'presence' has given itself to absence. A woman is being repeated in these paintings, a woman that may not necessarily be a woman. There are no signs of feminine voluptuousness in her stature. She is a faceless woman who can be of any gender, yet has a calm and elegant presence. Her slender body parts speak for her instead. Perhaps, Elaheh Heidari wants to tell us: “Look at me through my hands."
Figures are all seated in her works. Let's sit down to perhaps make some kind of dialogue happen. Let's be still so that maybe our world would get calmer. In the world of Elaheh Heidari's works nothing happens. Everything is still. Peace prevails in a dark and opaque background, in solitude. In one of the large format triptychs, a woman in a black dress is sitting on a couch. It's as if she has fled mourning and unrest to the safety of the couch. She has taken off her shoes and thrown them beside the couch. Now it's time for rest. Perhaps one can sit on the lifeless couch in Elaheh Heidari's painting and revive.
Figures are all solitary in Heidari's works. They sit beside objects and are lonely. The chair legs are delicate and fragile; the sofas are of cardboards and nonresistant. Everything happens on the surface, in a single moment. At that moment, however, it might be possible to reach stability. A traveler leaves behind his image on the way. He stops for a moment in a space with no dimension and sits in a place where falling is inevitable. But he lives in that moment, without a word and with no worry. In peace.

Azadeh Tahaie - Fall 2015