In Safe Word and Tight (2016), Ayari investigates the intersection of fig, branch, leaf and blood—primary forms that recured across her work throughout that time period. Through images of submission and isolation, the paintings seem suspended in or out of time evoking conceptual narratives of love and captivity. In this series, Ayari’s forms take on further abstraction yet with a sharpened clarity. Her saturated palette and high colours contrasts suggest a focused precision on the formal qualities of each shape. The fig appears repeatedly yet singularly in each composition verdant and ambiguous. As Kareem Estefan writes, “In her hands, the lush fruit aggregates poetic associations with sexuality and mystery,” emerging as an eye, a mouth, a limb, its meanings multiplying through repetition and juxtaposition. Ayari’s forms take on a bodily grammar that shifts from moment to moment: embodying openness then confinement; eroticism then vulnerability.

Painting a supple geometry of submission and dominance, her images seduce through the tension between the symbolic and the sensual, between the dead and the animate, between being and becoming.