Traditionally, an altar is a structure of offering and sacrifice, a threshold between presence and absence, life and death, grief and renewal. But beyond religion, altars can be understood as gestures: fragile fragments gathered into forms that insist on attention, spaces that resist disappearance and hold what cannot otherwise be held.

In this exhibition, Ghassan Zard reimagines the altar for our present, not as a site of devotion, but as a space of reckoning. Whereas his earlier works sought moments of playfulness and fleeting joy, here he turns to pain with unflinching directness, placing rupture at the centre. These altars become temporary architectures that hold grief, memory, and patience, opening spaces where fracture can be acknowledged, shared, and carried forward.

From this reimagining, the exhibition unfolds through two mediums, each carrying the weight of rupture in its own language.

The paintings return obsessively to the sea and the sky. Initially flat and calm, they expand into dense territories full of atmosphere, drift, and memory. What seems surface becomes depth, mirroring the inner life where feelings move beneath composure. Zard’s urgent gestures turn this “interior weather” into form: scratches, smears, and ruptures that transform water and air into thresholds of resistance and imagination.

The sculptures, cast in brass, rise from the ground like vessels, relics, or remains. Their surfaces bear scars, abrasions, and seams, so that making and form remain inseparable. Brass here is not passive matter but active voice. Zard allows heat, pressure, and chance to shape the works as much as intention. Out of this play between control and release, the sculptures emerge as events of becoming, at once monumental and fragile.

Together, the paintings and sculptures create altars not to divinity but to endurance.
Installed within Villa Audi’s layered mosaics and stones, they fold traces of past civilisations into contemporary gestures. The exhibition unfolds through three altars, each borrowing an ontological form. They trace distinct orientations: vertical, liminal, and horizontal. Veins of Ascent turns upward, staging verticality as resistance and contemplation. Cartographies of the In-Between opens passages where movement itself becomes ritual. The Bells After the Fire stretches outward, evoking fire as both devastation and revelation. Together, they compose a topology of being.

Rather than offering resolution, Zard invites us to pause, to stand before what exceeds us, and to reflect: How do we live with fracture? How do we hold memory without erasing it? And how can art itself become an altar, one that makes presence possible in the face of loss?