A painting signed Yasmina Nysten. Photo by Mansour Dib/Saleh Barakat Gallery
Beirut’s galleries are offering plenty of ways to see the familiar anew this fall. Here are three exhibitions that invite you into very different worlds, each shaped by its own blend of personal memory, cultural heritage and imagination.
The magic of ordinary things by Zena Assi at Tanit
From England, where she “chose” to settle about a dozen years ago, Zena Assi continues to make Lebanon the foundation of her art. But her work does not reproduce obvious landscapes or symbols; rather, it expresses, with rare subtlety, the nostalgia that remains with her. In recent years, this homesickness has led her to ceramics alongside painting. She began by shaping vases adorned with the pictorial scenes characteristic of her style.
These scenes bring together figures, slogans, and urban architecture through which she has depicted her vision of life in Beirut. At the same time, she began creating strange, baroque figurines that evoke both cherubs and gargoyles, flowers and insects, swarms of bees and the fluttering wings of butterflies.
These creatures of the forest, on the edge of which Zena lives near London, have become symbols of protective spirits for the artist, drawing her into a more poetic, natural, sensory, and wondrous world. It is a world where her Lebanese memories, nourished by a collection of objects brought from her parents’ apartment — “little ordinary things that have value only for the memories attached to them,” as she told us — mingle with inspiration drawn from her almost daily walks in the woods.
The result is a collection of paintings, ceramics and, most recently, striking sculptures presented at the Galerie Tanit in Beirut in an exhibition simply titled "Ordinary Things". Yet the enchanting scenography immediately draws the viewer into a state of contemplation that is both dreamy and attentive to the emergence of these little “ordinary things” in each work on display — things that nonetheless distill a strange sensation of magic.
📍 On display at Galerie Tanit in Beirut, Mar Mikhael, until Oct. 20.
Portraits and feelings by Yasmina Nysten at the Saleh Barakat Gallery
There is a Fauvist quality to the works Yasmina Nysten presents at the upper gallery of the Saleh Barakat Gallery. There is also an empathetic dimension, evocative of a certain progressive trend in American painting at the end of the 20th century. And finally, there is something indelibly marked by Lebanese memory. These three worlds intersect and converse in the work of the Lebanese-Finnish artist, now in her 30s, who graduated from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) and holds a master’s degree in digital arts from Pratt Institute in New York. She now lives in Oregon, in the United States.
Centered on portraiture, her small collection of paintings, gathered under the title "Memory Keepers" (The Guardians of Memory), conveys an almost cinematic atmosphere. A setting that is both subdued and intense envelops a series of women’s and men’s faces, captured, almost frozen, in moments of life, alone or in groups: daydreaming by the pool, gathered around morning coffee (raqwe) or with a teardrop rolling down a cheek. Through broad swaths of saturated color, layered with quick, fragmented strokes and contrasting tones, Yasmina creates canvases threaded with an underlying narrative.
Her subjects seize the viewer with gazes filled with a silent intensity that makes their exact expression difficult to define: sadness, weariness, worry, defiance, nostalgia, disenchantment or insight. These are interior states marked by subtle transitions, expressed through a brush dipped in a palette ranging from bright pink, suggesting a secret inner state, to a sharp green akin to a scream.
📍 On display at the upper gallery of the Saleh Barakat Gallery, Justinien Street, Clemenceau neighborhood, until Sept. 30.
The pop and memorial art of Adnan Charara at Maya Art Space
It is not often, especially nowadays, that one comes across art that brings a smile to your face. Yet an exhibition where whimsy and masterful technique combine with thoughtful reflection — profound without ever becoming heavy — can offer a sense of well-being. That is the effect produced by the paintings of Adnan Charara, currently on display under the title "The Occupation of Memory" at Maya Artspace in downtown Beirut.
The acrylics on canvas feature brightly colored figures and onomatopoeias borrowed from comic books and pop culture, superimposed on small black-and-white scenes populated by medieval characters. Far darker and more enigmatic, these figures seem to have emerged from ancient engravings and paintings by Bosch, Bruegel, Velázquez, and Goya. This collision between fragments of art history, popular culture, and collective imagination shapes the work of the Lebanese-American artist, who was born in Lebanon in 1962 and has lived in the United States since 1982.
From biblical narratives, whose deadly sins — violence, greed and avarice — he revisits, to founding mythologies such as "The Abduction of Europa," Charara reworks images and blurs their references. Figures from the past thus find themselves contaminated by signs of the present, in a play of correspondences that is as amusing as it is unsettling. Perhaps it is a way of inviting us to look differently at what we think we know: the mix of memories, images, and cultural heritage that occupies our minds. An exhibition that, beneath its sense of joy, poses a dizzying question: What remains of the stories, images and myths that have shaped us?
📍On display at Maya Artspace, downtown area, until Sept.30.
