DailyStar

BEIRUT: A dark-skinned woman with long black hair, dressed in jeans, sneakers and a simple yellow T-shirt, vacuums a rug.

Behind her, a large window reveals a view of a blue sky, marbled with fluffy white clouds, and the tops of a row of tall pines.

Captured in a bold, highly textured oils by Lebanese artist Rima Amyuni, this scene depicts an ordinary moment in the life of the artist’s maid, Dany. Entitled “Dany with Pine Trees,” the piece is one of a series of eight paintings and two charcoal drawings currently on show at Agial Art Gallery, all of them featuring Dany.

Painter Tagreed Darghouth held her second solo show “Fair and Lovely” at the same venue in 2010. Her works focused on maids suffering abuse from their employers, and the high number of runaways who end up on Lebanon’s streets.

Amyuni’s exhibition doesn’t seek to elicit the same kind of reflection upon the predicament of Lebanon’s migrant domestic workers. An artist who prefers to paint from direct observation, often taking the landscapes around her house in Yarzé as her subject, Amyuni paints Dany much as she might a tree or a flower.

The fact that she chooses to return to Dany as a subject betrays the affection the artist feels for her employee. The choice of exhibition title, “A Tribute to a House Fairy,” was no doubt selected with good intentions. Yet its faintly patronizing tone exemplifies some of the troubling issues embedded within this show.

Born in 1954, Amyuni studied art in London and New York. Her bold, colorful canvases are executed in a faux naive style – a deliberate decision to work as an outsider artist, gallerist Saleh Barakat says.

Her portraits capture Dany posing at Amyuni’s request – sitting beside a vase of sunflowers or standing in the artist’s studio in a startling mauve suit – as well hard at work around the house. Dany vacuums. She irons. She peels potatoes. Amyuni paints it all.

To display these paintings at all, the gallerist suggests, is something of a daring move for a commercial gallery. After all, who would want to hang a picture of a maid in the living room?

Barakat sees the work as subversive, a means of bestowing status upon a class of people whose existence and rights in Lebanon are often completely overlooked. This highlights one of the exhibition’s problematic aspects. Issues of social class, ethnicity, power and agency are raised, but not addressed – a herd of elephants left to knock about the room.

What would really be subversive, of course, would be to show artwork by a migrant domestic worker or laborer. That seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

Amyuni’s tribute to her employee shows a woman defined by her work. The one painting that seems to capture something more – conveying a sense of the subject’s individuality – is entitled “Dany and Elizabeth.” In it, Dany stands in the street, hand extended toward a black woman of a similar age.