you recognize my restlessness? 2022, 150x115cm, cold wax and oil on canvas
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, a narrative rooted in the continual spiral 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.
Threads and lines roam in the space of her paintings, expressing the thoughts and feelings that circulate in her mind. The loop in her process of erasing and reinstating her lines is a poetic metaphor to a state of “liminality” a process of transitioning from one boundary to the next. Chaar’s works bring forth an accumulation of gestures that are on the verge of becoming atoms, creatures, spaces or mindscapes, however, her paintings remain suspended in their abstraction where possibilities are still conceivable.
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 material piling up on Chaar’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 dream like state that persists, according to her, until her hands abdicate.
