© Jessie Deeter

It's a strange place to find the next wave of modern Beiruti art. Once the star of commerce and fashion for the Middle East, Beirut's downtown harbors the blasted-out hulls of buildings that are the leftovers of a decade-and-a-half-long war.
In a sharp contrast indicative of the chaos and strange beauty of the still-scarred city, some ruins and reconstruction in the center of town are shielded from view by the earth-toned murals of an artist who is making a symbolic contribution to the restoration of her country. "We must rebuild ourselves," said recently repatriated Lebanese painter Gina Succar, a youthful looking, tanned woman of 49. "I try to reconstruct things so they will be prettier, only that, erasing the exterior marks of the war, because human scars are something else."
Lebanese by ancestry but raised in Argentina, Succar made a painful return to her roots five years ago, following a 20-year absence. Reconstruction was far from her mind. She moved to Lebanon because her husband, a Lebanese expatriate like herself, wanted to return to his roots. The reality of landing in a city devastated by civil war and Israeli bombardment was depressing. "It was very hard for me in the beginning because I saw only destruction around me," she said.

© Jessie Deeter

Succar hadn't seen Beirut since 1974, when she came to visit friends and family. "Before the war it was magnificent," she said. "It was gay, amusing. I was shocked to come back and confront all the cadavers of these buildings; it was like a ghost town." Today, she is one of three artists charged by Solidere, the governmental monolith behind the controversial renovation of downtown Beirut, with camouflaging the work while it is underway. Solidere's implementation of a compulsory shares-for-land deal with landowners earned suspicion and criticism from some Beirutis, but the resulting fantasyland of murals symbolizes the possibility of Beirut regaining its former glory.
The combined effort of Solidere and the artists at first glance makes one doubt that there ever really was a war. Which is precisely the effect Solidere was after. The murals fit the mood of the already completed construction in the middle of the new downtown, where extra-wide cobblestone streets are flanked with rows of buildings in soothing tans and yellows. It's a wealth of space and air that is an extreme relief after the crushing crowded modernity of Hamra, the current center of Beiruti activity. All this grandeur doesn't come cheap--at least 700 million US dollars for the infrastructure alone, according to Solidere spokesperson Nabil Rached. "If Solidere didn't exist, the reconstruction wouldn't exist either," said Succar. Succar herself is a new spirit in Beirut, the Arab capital where one sees carefully coifed women in form-revealing designer clothes.