Reading the works of Sara Chaar is like jumping into a rambling stream of consciousness, created with instinctual marks that transfer her impulses and feelings directly onto the canvas. Her creative process is a cumulative cycle of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing, echoing the aftermath stories of torn cities, a narrative rooted in the continual loop of demolition and rebirth.
When she undertakes a new work, she accumulates layers of paint and material that she uses as a foundation, which she then scratches through with screwdrivers, cutters and palette knives, instinctively forcing out transformations and translations of her encounters with materials, sounds and matters of life. In her most recent works she uses soft colors like light pink or baby blue in opposition to her aggressive marks or her more abrupt colors like red or black.
Chaar’s practice and life feed each other. Her works question her own experiences that are in constant change and movement. Working allows Sara to take a moment to visually contextualize what she is drawn to and detach it from reality.
As far as the eye goes, there always seems to be, endless layers of color piling up on Sara's canvases. These layers for her are fleeting lines of a heated conversation between her and the work; between her and her unconscious. What appears between her intuitively painted masses of color, crayon marks, oil or wax, are these unspoken, unrevised ideas and distorted images that spring up without warning.
In her painting process her identity plays its role as she goes “in and out” of the painting like a spectator and creator at the same time, like a foreign body that the work takes possession of before being dissociated from it. A state of trance that persists, according to her, until her hands abdicate.
Layers, time, layers, time, layers time... 2022,150x115cm, cold wax and oil on canvas
i am a stranger, 2022, 150x115cm, cold wax and oil on canvas
you recognize my restlessness? 2022, 150x115cm, cold wax and oil on canvas