Sara Chaar’s 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 stimulating 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.