Literature

Chafa Ghaddar's practice is rooted in fresco, a medium she studied intensively in Florence in 2012 and has since pursued as a contemporary mode of making. The painted surface captures the slow accumulation of pigment into the wet ground as both ruin and residue, vulnerability and strength.

The Rehearsals for Fertile Dreams series originates in a large-scale fresco mural produced as a site-specific intervention for Fertile Dreams at Tabari Artspace. Painted directly onto gypsum board cladded to the gallery wall in anticipation of its dismantling, Ghaddar worked intuitively over successive days, layering landscapes, dreamscapes and the gestured suggestion of a rising sun, in response to the exhibition's terrain of soil and psyche. At the close of the exhibition, the mural was dismantled.

The new works retrieve fragments of that mural and rebuild them. The act of dismantling cedes the artist's control over the edges, the fractures, the contours of what survives. The fresco rearranges itself in a new composition, the cut traces of wall visible at the boundary, the fragments speaking a new language to the artist.

Ghaddar is interested in the proposition of a contemporary fresco that is movable, transportable, vulnerable to circulation. Where the historic fresco is fixed to architecture and never leaves it, this body of work proposes a fresco that travels, exposed to the conditions of global cities and the contemporary art circuit, the work entering its own afterlife as it transports and transmutes.