Samuel Johnson-Schlee on This is Now

Jess Allen is a connoisseur of the sofa and the paintings on display in This is Now reveal the drama and the romance that is hidden amongst the cushions. Something I like about soft furnishings is the way they hold your body. The foam and feathers which fill the pillows on your sofa are designed to meet you just right. And when you get up from the sofa you can still see the places where your weight lay most heavily. It is a kind of relationship, the right upholstery becomes a source of comfort, pleasure, a certain kind of sensuality. To live together with someone, and to share your furnishings is its own kind of loving. To settle down in the warm hollow left by someone you live with and feel good about it is a marker of great romance. 

Not all furniture is equal in its affections. You have probably sat on a sofa which does not love you back, one that resents your presence and pushes back harder than you press down upon it. A sofa that makes you feel abject, that disguises your presence with its too-firm foam. The kind of furniture that you might find in a waiting room or an airport, or a furnished rented apartment. Good furnishing creates a certain reciprocity in between a body and a cushion. A good piece of furniture is welcoming; it wants you to press yourself down into it and leave behind an imprint of your behind. Telling the story of sofas that love you is bittersweet, it can also remind us of the furniture that doesn’t. 

The philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin observed the way that soft furnishings record the presence of the people that use them. He compared the bourgeois interior of the nineteenth century to a compass case, a velveteen interior designed to hold the body in place and protect it from harm. The home is a kind of imprint then, and the materials which we choose to furnish it with are often chosen specifically for their tactility. Benjamin called velvet “the material in which traces are left especially easily”. A desire to have furniture that embraces us makes that furniture particularly good at recording the way we use it. 

It is for this reason, says Benjamin, that the nineteenth century saw the birth of the detective novel. Highly decorated interiors kept such a good record of the things that interacted with them that expert interpreters could tell you what had happened there just by looking around. Literary detectives like Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, were experts at finding truth in mundane traces. They were able to perform miracles of insight based on their attention to domestic detail. However in their pursuit of genius each detective overlooks the greater drama recorded by the home. Blinkered by a hunt for wrongdoing Dupin and Holmes neglect the true story recorded by furnishing. 

The clues left behind in our daily lives narrate a drama every bit as enthralling as a murder mystery. The placement of a cushion, a pile of books, or an abandoned crossword each a starting point for the story of an entire life. Today we might see our homes as fulfilling a similar function. Try to read your own home like a crime scene. Come home late one evening and try to guess where your husband sat to eat his solitary dinner, pad through the house at 2am and try to figure out whether your child has done its homework or assembled its gym kit, look in on your kitchen and try to work out your flatmate’s thought process when making themselves a frozen pizza at 3am.

In Jess Allen’s paintings she proves herself a more astute observer of the home than any detective. Her images linger on the places where the presence of a person brushes up against their home and leaves a trace. A pile of books narrates what?: an afternoon browsing, a search for something in particular, a person who keeps starting new books without finishing the last one. The fabric on a sofa cushion has become a little baggy, a previously tautly upholstered object now a little tired and all the more inviting for it. The almost erotic drama of the place where four sofa cushions meet. The gap left in between is almost demanding that an arm should reach behind them. Is Allen the kind of person that regularly removes Bic biros and loose change from the back of the sofa? Or is there an archive of dust and paper clips inside that piece of furniture? 

The most enthralling elements of these images come from Allen’s mastery of the most fleeting of indexical signs. In the lacunae left where a person blocks the light that floods the scene. In the shadows that fall softly onto the furniture: marks which leave no trace except in Allen’s paintings. There is great nuance to the way these silhouettes are treated; they are not the menacing elongated phantoms of film noir. So often shadows are spooky or sad. They could be an indicator that someone is being watched, it could be a poetic conceit designed to elicit a tragic absence. But Allen does something more interesting with the dark profiles of her out-of-frame figures. Allen’s shadows express the straightforward but meaningful presence of a cohabitee. It makes me think of the feeling of someone you live with squeezing past you while you wash dishes or standing beside you when you brush your teeth. These images are not crime scene reconstructions but a record of how it feels to be close enough to someone else that your shadows would form a single dark shape on the upholstery. 

It is not easy to live with someone else; and it is a luxury to be able to do so without risk. In my life I have found very few people tolerable for much longer than the length of a lease. And the blending of shadows and quiet intimacy of the figures in Allen’s paintings speak of the hard won security of being able to live with someone else. In Holly Pester’s genius novel The Lodgers a narrator describes the life of the person that has replaced her as lodger in the house of a single parent and child. Pester writes: 

“This is when you first think about me, really looking at the diagram, it shows that I exist as a name and a story, but also as a body that was in your bed, emanating, spreading forth, tracing sleep curves and having bum cheeks. With outrage and triumph you imagine how yours will go there tonight. I’m sorry but this rotation of buttocks and welcomes is what you are now economically part of. Get used to it.” 

The Lodgers is a piece of work sharply in contrast to Allen’s paintings, it tells of the precarity and turmoil of trying to find a place to live. But at the same time identifies the same romance in co-presence; the significance of sharing sofas and of sleeping in the same bed that someone else once did, even if you will never meet them. 

Allen’s paintings have a kind of clarity which exists only for those that know who last sat on their sofa, and whose traces patinate the surfaces around them. But I feel that Allen knows the rarity of what she depicts, these moments are jewel-like. Her decision to zero in on these still and ordinary moments is evidence that she knows what makes them noteworthy. Part of the fascination that these images command is that it is not straightforward to feel so safe with another person. In depicting these interiors so lovingly Allen tacitly acknowledges the noise that surrounds them – outside. It is unusual to be able to love the marks left behind on the chair where you are going to sit. It is so intimate to record the indexical traces left behind on a sofa by the ‘rotation of buttocks’. These images are romances, tracing a kind of ordinary love, all the more majestic. Whose shadow could you let drape over your sleeping body, without a shiver creeping up your spine?