Six Layers for a Shirt Nobody Ironed
By Kais
The shirt in Hustle Equity took six layers of paint to get right. Not because the color was difficult, though it was—yellow always is, requiring repeated coats before it stops reading as transparent—but because the shirt itself had to be wrong in a specific way. Oversized. Unironed. Crisp in the wrong places. Kais wanted it to fight the jacket worn over it, to make the whole outfit a contradiction that somehow still read as an attempt at elegance. Getting that tension down to a brushstroke took time.
Kais is a Tunisian-born painter who has been based in Dubai long enough to have built a clientele there before he built a gallery practice. For years he customized luxury bags and personal belongings for private clients, work that demanded the kind of precision that now shows up in his fine art: a 0.1 brush for the final details, layered color mixing before the top coat goes on, and a process that begins with a background wash, then a collage of glued dollar bills, then the characters painted directly over them. He runs a showroom and gallery in Dubai where the finished works are shown. The canvases are large, the figures are from classic animation, and the dollar bills are real.
The two works he has released so far in 2026, The Billionaire and Hustle Equity, share the same formal logic. Real one-dollar bills are adhered to the canvas surface, and the painted figures—Bugs Bunny, Goofy, Donald Duck, a cast of characters drawn from mid-century American animation—are placed on top of or in dialogue with whatever is already printed on the bills. Kais is deliberate about the denomination. A one-dollar bill carries a serial number, a specific print run, a physical history. Painting over it makes the work unrepeatable in a way that a blank canvas cannot quite replicate. He described the appeal plainly: each bill brings a different mood, different fingerprints, a different soul—a structural argument about singularity built into the material itself.
Hustle Equity (2026, acrylic on canvas with collaged dollar bills) is the more crowded of the two works. Bugs Bunny anchors the composition—Kais started with him, in part because the character carries a specific set of associations he wanted to establish early. Around him: Goofy in a Joker costume, a woman who reads as Bugs's partner, a figure with Donald Duck, and a man with what Kais described as sarcastic eyes looking out from the canvas with a devil on his shoulder. Goofy holds a Bitcoin coin. He wears a ring engraved with the number one. His shirt is the one that needed six layers.
The Joker reference is not incidental. Kais talked about Goofy's expression at some length—the smile, what he called the "sneaky peaky eyes," the way the character seems to be observing the scene rather than participating in it. "The way how he is dressing up with the Joker costume makes him for me a person who's dealing with this underground, or maybe the hidden society that's holding up all this Bitcoin and digital wallets currency," he said. The costume is a mask for a specific type of contemporary behavior: the accumulation of wealth conducted just below the surface of visible life, announced only through the objects carried and worn.
That observation comes from living in a city where the performance of financial status is constant and highly legible. Kais said it does not traumatize him—it is something he sees every day, the cars, the clothes, the stated earnings. He wanted to put that behavior somewhere he could look at it steadily, which is what the canvas is for. Disney characters are the vehicle because they carry a particular kind of cultural weight: familiar to the point of invisibility, associated with childhood, and therefore available for repurposing. Kais does not present them as corrupted innocents but as accurate portraits of people he already sees. Goofy in a Joker suit holding Bitcoin is not a satirical distortion; it is Goofy as he actually appears in the social landscape Kais is painting from. The cartoon frame makes the behavior easier to look at directly.
The detail work in both paintings is where Kais's twenty-five years of practice shows most clearly. He uses brushes down to 0.1 millimeters for the final pass, working over layers mixed specifically to achieve opacity without muddying the color. Yellow requires building up in stages—each layer slightly more saturated than the last—until it holds. The goal is what he called a "nourishing" line: a color that reads as fully present, not as a glaze over something else. He mixes intermediate colors into the base before the final shade goes on, so the top layer has something to grip.
In Hustle Equity, the Bitcoin coin Goofy holds required its own set of decisions. The edges had to be clean enough to read as a specific object rather than a generic disc. The shine had to land without tipping into illustration. Kais said it came easily—one of the few elements in the piece that did not require revision. The shirt was harder. The crisp-but-wrong quality he was after, the sense of a garment that is oversized and not quite ironed but worn with deliberate effort, took the full six layers to land. "The shirt was the contrast of his outfit," he said. "So it took me some time to just have these details."
The planning for both works was done before a brush touched canvas. Kais was firm on this: the composition, the characters, the symbolic elements—the ring, the Bitcoin, the Joker costume—were all decided in advance. The painting process is about execution, not discovery. What shifts between the first layer and the last is precision, not intention. He described the whole canvas as a scenario planned from beginning to end, every element placed where it needed to be. "That's why I call it Hustle Equity," he said, "like it's how people are trying to impress each other with what they have and what they do."
Near Bugs Bunny, almost hidden, Kais painted a small figure he described as a taboo—a character gesturing at the idea that what is happening in the canvas is not finished, that the accumulation and display depicted there has no natural endpoint. The figure signals that the work is ongoing, that the hustle does not resolve. It is the smallest element in a busy composition and probably the one that requires the most looking to find.
The Billionaire (2026, acrylic on canvas with collaged dollar bills) operates with a tighter cast. The title announces its subject without irony. The figure at its center is presented in terms similar to Goofy—someone dressed for an effect, aware of being watched, performing for a scene. The dollar bills beneath the paint are part of the image's argument: money is the substrate, not the subject. The subject is what people do to be seen having it. Where Hustle Equity spreads its argument across a crowd, The Billionaire concentrates it in a single figure, the isolation making the performance more legible.
Kais's path to this practice ran through a decade of commissioned work on luxury goods. The precision required to customize a high-end bag for a private client—clean lines, accurate color matching, no margin for error on a surface that already has value—translated directly into the technical discipline of his fine art. The transition to a full gallery practice is recent, but the twenty-five years of handling paint are not. The showroom in Dubai is where the work lives now, in a city that has made the subject matter available on a daily basis, in real time, with real people wearing real things.
When asked which part of a finished canvas his own eyes land on first, Kais did not pick a single element. He said the whole painting tells a story and it is hard to isolate one stroke when they are all linked. "It's like a cliché of cinema—all linked together," he said. "Each person will see it with his own vision." It was a practical observation about how pictures work, offered without gallery-speak.
Near the end of the conversation, with the details of Goofy's jacket and the devil's layered expression still in the air, Kais returned to the small hidden figure beside Bugs Bunny's cash—the one signaling that none of this is finished. "I'm not yet done," the figure says. Kais left it at that.
Discover more of Kais's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.