What if frescoes lost confidence? The works in this exhibition display fresco as process. Here, I problematize this historical technique and question its principles. In particular, I employ the giornata— the mark of how much painting can be done in a day, usually concealed in standard fresco practice—as a finality, a permanent and visible mark. Therefore, a territory of a new skin arises repeatedly. My actions revive a deep desire to paint, to spend time with colors and texture, and vitally immerse myself in the materials. Recesses demands to be experienced intimately. You walk into the show and you touch meaning without touching anything. learn more   

The artist hones in on the idea of ‘the visit’ to revel in the complexity lurking below its seeming simplicity. Much like the threshold, a visit is treacherous. At once invitation (you were asked here) and invasion (you penetrate a space), no visit is innocent. The threshold is a membrane. Having just crossed one, you have accomplished, unknowingly, a complex, invisible gesture. From limen, the Latin for threshold, we hold liminal—an obscure suspension between two states. This is the realm of the imperceptible in-between. A moment ago, you were neither fully inside nor entirely outside. Here yet not yet here. Eased into a familiar gallery sanctum, yet still writhing in a strident Beirut beyond. You were perfectly liminal, between two postures: pre- and post-, former and latter, near and here.  This is exactly where the artist wants you. Kevin Jones.

Sky as elsewhere, sky as wound, sky as betrayal, sky as rebirth, sky as grief, sky as shelter, sky as consolation; how could one stop painting skies?

Following her fresco piece "Corps", the artist was commsisoned to produce new works evoking the fragmentation of the body and skin in fresco medium.

Safa Public Library is undergoing major transformations and is in a stage of construction while the commission is in progress. Subject to a second renovation, the building will preserve its original structure while turn- ing into a contemporary architectural space. The interstitial phase in the Library’s life was the starting point of the work, that is an intervention on the few original walls - these custodians of collective memory and shared experience amongst the Library’s users.Sourced from archival photographs and new renders from the building, as well as from the artist’s subjective visual associations with the place; the composition of this mural is the result of intertwining surfaces and textures.Expanding on the building’s existing surfaces, “I am still learning” is inspired by the classical technique of “Azulejos”. These monochromatic tiles, hand-painted one by one and over layered become like a “new skin” that encapsulates decipherable stories of the place’s history through the interpretation of textures.The choice of this Portuguese tradition stems from the artist’s interest in treating surfaces in site-specific works as a continuation of her previous fresco-inspired contemporary murals.“I am still learning” is an intervention that generates dialogues between the building’s different temporalities, architecture and the artist; that can be overheard through the wall.
Like a living organism, this library in the making, symbolic of knowl- edge and growth will be “forever’’ marked by this commission empha- sizing another form of knowledge production. The Arabic title, extract from the Quran (Surat Youssef, Ayah 76) is from an inscription found on photographs from the old library’s entrance hall.

Commissioned by Galerie Tanit and exhibited at Art Dubai, March 2018.

The objects presented by the designers suggests a mixture that is developed from the geographic and economic make up of a site, by extracting deposits from a hotel, residence or factory in the state of construction and deconstruction. The material (marble) initially quarried from rock masses and years of geological formations, is now quarried from waste disposal plants and awaits a chemical process. A process that produces a concrete paste composed of cement, marble fragments and varied pigments.In response to this concept and aesthetic, the mural evokes the regeneration of marble from its origin and presence at geological queries to its dusty state and waste in the marble factories. A whole cycle of that transition is felt through the layers of the fresco.

Exhibited in “Exposure 2012”, a collective exhibition held each year to promote emerging artists, at Beirut Art Center.Spectrum is a project that attempts to evoke the memory of the house where I grew up and deeply cherish. Faced with a severe fire back in 1985, as well as unremitting erosion, mold and humidity, my home bore witness to ongoing, massive degradation. Although the house is still inhabited, its element of stability and its reality to me seems to be fleeting.Taking photographic images used to enact my resistance, an attempt to capture what I was missing in order to keep a trace of what is being defaced. I conjured these traces as a body, a standstill originating from the state of degradation. I wanted to reveal the surviving marks of my home, to embolden the substance and praise it.To serve this purpose I chose to work with the buon fresco technique by applying natural pigments on a wet mortar surface. The air then fixes the pigments, dries the surface, and creates stability. Mineral charcoal and ashes evoke the memory of the fire, black and red iron powders echo the image of erosion, and the mixture of water with air produce the smell of mold.Spectrum is a part of a larger quest to regenerate the reality of my childhood home.

The curators commissioned 20 artists, born after 1973, to create a work in the media of their choice and informed by aspects of Lebanese modernism. The purpose was to reflect on the theme and investigate the works of artists born before 1930.

My work reflected on a state of rupture in which the contemporary artist lost the dialogue with his predecessors. The choice of producing a self-portrait personalizes this statement.

Coloring the hills around my house where I used to play, my father, fascinated by the scenery, consistently took pictures of me surrounded by these beautiful plant families. Times changed, and the natural landscapes turned into separated territories for private residences.Yet the plants kept growing, resistant in the remaining plots of land. In this project, I revisited the photographs taken by my father in the late 1980s and intended, by photographing images, to create new frames where the focal point transfers and travels through these plants and moments abandoned in time.From digital prints to painted media, my photographs are explored under different stages. With this evolution, I’m interested in the transfer of the photographic image onto another image, nature and chemistry, just like any nostalgic imagery I had that was recalled, reminisced and relived.

Shot in my childhood home, this series started in 2009 as part of my diploma project and culminated in a fresco work three yeas after. Using Photography here is a medium of reconciliation with a suspended reality. 

Beirut has always been subject to massive construction and destruction activities, and generates fields in constant flux.In this series I aim to treat the three-dimensional spaces as unified surfaces in order to reconcile with a city that became fleeting to me.

From September 9 to September 15, I Executed “Propagazione”, a large scale site -specific mural drawing by and for artist Giuseppe Penone, for his exhibition “Breath is a Sculpture” at Beirut Art Center, with the collaboration of Marco Cordero.

Beirut has been assaulted with degradation. Traces of wars animate its spaces and turn them into monuments. Ambitious reconstruction projects have been invading and are slowly defacing the city. We are on the verge of a takeover.

In light of this imposed flux, I stand as an urbanite trying to assimilate what is being communicated. Instead of feeling soothed by the promise of a restored city, I feel like I am witnessing Beirut at the threshold of a collapse.

How can I visualize a city in a constant state of ruin?

In this project I capture an emblem of destruction in progress, a construction site in Beirut. Paradoxically, it also feels like an image of the city in its primary state of becoming. I manipulated the photographic procedure in such a way as to allow plenty of light to penetrate through the sensitive surface of the negative. While processing the photograph, my work consists of forcing as much brightness as possible from what seemed to be a burnt image. The visible pixels were meant to emulate the actual dust that occupies the site. Yet, my intention is not to magnify the extent of degradation of this ruined place, but rather to purify the image from the residues of reality.

In a way, Living Relic attempts at regenerating the city’s immaculateness.

ARTS is a Restaurant and Cocktail bar designed by Gregory Gatserelia and inspired by the surrealism movement. The artist and in collaboration with the team at Beirut Art Residency developed a concept for its walls around the idea of "secret society", digging in some historical refrences of the "Bal de Rotschild" among others.For the bespoke murals, the artist did a large scale wall collage combining fresco technique and gilding with photographs printed on Japanese Kozo paper. 

MATTO is an italian restaurant that dares to be different, taking a stand against normality.Instead of depicting classic italian icons or cliches, Ghaddar chose to personalise the restaurant's experience and  chose her subjects directly from the Matto team: The first time she painted one of the chefs and the second time the waitress, both in conversation with a fish, as crazy as the meaning of Matto suggests. Both murals were executed using charcoal, acrylic paint and varnish.

The research and execution are exclusively developped for every projet, making each mural a unique experience for both the client and the artist.

For this Dubai wedding, the event planners at the White Boutique comissioned the artist to create and execute a textured and painted finishing on large scale wooden panels, which will be used as a monumental backdrop at the venue.

The artist was comissioned by the fashion designer to create a backdrop inspired by the representation of forests and landscapes in the paintings of Gustave Courbet and other painters of that era.

The artist was comissioned to develop textures that evoke nuances of white colour for the 4th floor and black colour for the 5th floor. The outcome is a result of overlaying and exhausting multiple laces, ornaments and patterns all together. Not every square meter is the same.

Charcoal, erosive iron powder, ashes and ultramarine pigment on fresh lime mortar.

The artist was comissioned to reproduce the map of the mediteranean sea on the ceiling of the restaurant/ bar.

Be it a given surface.
Bearer of human thought, memory tool.This exhibition finds its genesis in paper, "Custodian of the ancient times." As a material substrate, the space of the page is the flat surface where the marks that trace the beginning of all things as well as their secrets.
Paper space is the material body of a book, holders of our written traditions that keep nourishing our myths, shaping our knowledge and our memory.
This exhibition which references the birth of assembled knowledge should be seen like an ‘open book’ albeit a hidden or long forgotton volume that lives only in fantasy. Our selection of works will attempt to trace bit by bit the poetic content of this imagined space and its lost meanings. Here, the eye wanders between graphic narratives, mental maps, fragments of research on complex ecosystems, all the works being shown are closely linked to thier paper surfaces through different marks and gestures. Most of the works despite their differences in some way help to narrate the inside of this ‘open book’.Before curious eyes stories will unfold, stories of life and death: unnamed legends, readings and interpretations of the natural, biology studies, chemistry, botany and astronomy. On the surface of the paper all forms of knowledge will become figurative, each in its turn rational or celestial  express their relative or an absolute knowledge.L’espace de la feuille, a range of possibilities where knowledge and imagination express themselves. A place where science and magic are intertwined, where the tangible and the dreamworld meet to tell tales about the infinitely small and the infinitely large, and at the same time celebrate the beauty of world and its complexity.learn more