Galerie Claude Lemand

Sara Chaar, Un unti­tled body. Recent paint­ings.

To cel­e­brate the 35th anniver­sary of his gallery, which was founded in Paris in October 1988, Claude Lemand, a col­lector, gallery owner, art pub­lisher, and major donor to the Institut du Monde Arabe museum, is pleased to offer a selec­tion of sump­tuous recent paint­ings by artist SARA CHAAR to Parisian and inter­na­tional audi­ences. Her "song of self and the world" is expressed through her lyrical com­po­si­tions ranging from micro­scopic images of her body to cosmic visions of the uni­verse.

From the poetry of her forms (tiny com­po­nents cap­tured in pow­erful liquid move­ments and agglu­ti­nating in fluc­tu­ating com­po­si­tions and meta­mor­phoses that over­flow the limits of the can­vases) to the poetry of her colors (large masses of red, blue, white and purple and her pink hues which may con­nect to flesh and skin). Armed with a long prac­tice of pic­to­rial mate­rial and a desire to explore one’s bio­log­ical and sexual iden­tity, she explores the mys­tery of one­self here and else­where, much like a biol­o­gist who explores with his micro­scope or an astronomer with his tele­scope, the planets and suns... in search of the mys­tery of one­self, here and else­where.

In An unti­tled body, Sara Chaar explores exis­ten­tial inquiries that ques­tion the con­flicting ideas between bio­log­ical char­ac­ter­is­tics and social con­struc­tions of iden­tity, through a series of abstract com­po­si­tions that act as metaphor­ical maps of the artist’s anatomy and psyche. Chaar relies on visual strate­gies that nur­tured her pre­vious series like What Remains on the Walls, a series of large scale paint­ings that serve as an inti­mately con­cep­tu­al­ized tes­ti­mony to the his­tory of the city using the mem­o­ries that remain on the walls. The series was made by copying and lay­ering imprints of traces of time and past events left on the walls in Beirut.

In her new body of work Chaar uses frag­ments of micro­scopic images of chro­mo­somes, cells and close-up views of her own body that she manip­u­lates by either altering their scale or using only bits and pieces. The bio­log­ical imagery that inspired this series func­tion as both the point of origin and des­ti­na­tion of her instinc­tive working pro­cess. However, instead of being left apparent, these ref­er­ents, which also touch upon the artist’s iden­tity, inhabit each of the paint­ings’ layers, trans­forming them into ges­tures that unveil the psy­cho­log­ical and phys­i­o­log­ical depths that lie beneath the skin.

Sara Chaar’s works serve as per­sonal tes­ti­monies that operate as uncon­scious nego­ti­a­tions between our bodies and the cul­tur­ally deter­mined codes that con­struct thought. Given that iden­tity for­ma­tion can be seen as a con­se­quence of trans­gres­sion and taboo, what images arise that encap­su­late the with­held sen­ti­ments of the self: emo­tional mind­scapes, a floating infinity of cells and organs, or merely an accu­mu­la­tion of layers that pro­gres­sively erases the memory of the brush stroke that pre­ceded it?