Curatorial Text
In INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, Sara Chaar presents a new body of work that begins with the walls of Beirut. Marked by time, wear, and repeated transformation, these surfaces become points of departure rather than subjects to be reproduced. Working from photographs of cracked facades, Chaar isolates fragments of forms and carries them into her paintings, where they develop into a visual vocabulary of fissures, traces, passages, and shifting territories.
For INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, Chaar works with oil and wax, building her surfaces through successive layers. Paint is applied, covered, scraped back, and reworked, allowing what has disappeared to return in altered form. The process is one of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction. Each intervention changes what came before without completely erasing it. Like the walls that first prompted them, the paintings hold evidence of different moments within the same surface.
Yet INSIDE OF OUTSIDE moves beyond the architecture of the city. Chaar’s compositions resist a fixed scale or singular reading. From one perspective, they suggest landscapes seen from above, fragmented territories, geological formations, or eroded maps. From another, they become intimate and bodily. Cracks resemble scars or veins, openings become passages, and the distinction between landscape and body begins to dissolve. A landscape can become a body; a body can open into territory.
Central to this body of work is the idea of the palimpsest, a surface upon which successive layers accumulate while traces of earlier ones remain. In Chaar’s paintings, however, what lies beneath is not simply a record of the past. It continues to act upon the present, pushing through layers of material and altering what becomes visible.
The title INSIDE OF OUTSIDE speaks precisely to this movement. Interior and exterior are not presented as opposites, but as conditions that continually act upon one another. Surface becomes a threshold between what is visible and what is concealed, between the physical city and the intimate body, between what has accumulated and what continues to emerge.
Through INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, Chaar invites us to look at a surface not as an ending, but as a place of passage. What we see is only one layer of what is there. The inside continues to work upon the surface.
- Noha Wadi Moharram
