14 January - 15 April 2023

CONTINUOUS

by Sara Chaar

Aptly titled, “Continuous” is Chaar’s second solo show at Marie Jose Gallery. After the success of “Wanderings” in 2021, Chaar is back with a new collection of highly personal works. Impressive in scale, the works are tidal waves of emotions when observed from afar. Incredibly rich in detail, however, they can also be read like the pages of a diary when scrutinised meticulously. For the artist, painting is an intimate process through which she embeds her sense of identity and explores her relationship to her body. Intimately visceral, her canvases are riddled with vein-like lines through which her creativity flows and onto which her paintbrushes bleed.

Expressive and complex, the works produced for “Continuous” are intended to be experienced in the flesh. Infused with stories and generous in revelations, these works are meant to be read like contemporary palimpsests - constantly communicating more to those who look deeper. The exhibition will be on display at Marie Jose Gallery in South Kensington in London until the end of February 2023.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sara Chaar is a Lebanese Visual Artist whose abstract compositions are highly textured and heavily emotional battlefields of colour, marks and scratches. There is a stark contrast between the softness of the colours utilised and the brutality of the scrapes and scratches scattered all over her canvases.

Chaar’s canvases can be compared to the lifecycle of palimpsests; ancient manuscripts made from animal skin on which texts could be scraped off or washed off, allowing for new texts to be written. Indeed, she works with translucent layers of cold wax and oil paint stratified over one another and energetically scratched off with screwdrivers, cutters and palette knives. While every fresh coat of paint adds to the story communicated by the canvas, every scratch either conceals or reveals a part of this narrative. As a result, viewers are confronted with a rich visual world, where traces left by the artist’s interventions give birth to a language of their own. Chaar invites viewers to delve deeper than the surface of the canvases, and to conduct their own semiotic study of the works before them.

Chaar’s creative process is a continuous cycle of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing, echoing the evolution of the cities that we live in from creation, to demolition, to rebirth. Much like her hometown Beirut, Chaar’s canvases have all experienced many transformations, each one of which have enhanced them with new layers of depth.