Jenna Bitar: Reclaiming the Earth Through Abstraction

Our planet is no longer facing a symbolic conflict, but a measurable one. Across ecosystems and cultures, land is being reshaped by extraction, overdevelopment and environmental neglect. These pressures affect not only the physical terrain but also the spiritual and cultural relationships humans maintain with it.

An on-going battle between construction versus deconstruction and men versus nature. With the undergoing chaos happening, many contemporary artists are moving beyond aesthetics alone, using their practices to question systems of consumption and to recover voices historically silenced by industrial progress. A re-connection to earthly roots and where we truly come from.

Jenna Bitar.

Based on the island of Bali, Indonesia, Jenna Bitar is a French and Lebanese painter whose work centers on honoring the stories of Mother Earth-Gaia-through abstract landscape painting. Influenced by her surroundings, Bitar approaches painting as a form of embodied inquiry rather than a simple representation.

Working with intuitive movements, she builds a practice that relies on her innate knowledge within herself, forming a strong bond of trust with the unpremeditated actions that channel the energy of the natural world. Inspired by the geography of the earth, her compositions engage with the elements that shape the everyday human environments, incorporating acrylics, pastels, organic derivatives and a unique mélange of materials sourced from the land itself. Drawing from Saharan deserts, volcanoes, oceans, rivers, jungles, cosmic forms and the hues of diverse terrains, her paintings express an abundant appreciation for the multiplicity of life that is so often taken for granted.

Left: Andes, by Jenna Bitar.

Right: Bilbao, by Jenna Bitar.

While Bitar’s works remain rooted in abstraction and thus open to interpretations, it is no doubt that they function as strong political propositions. Her paintings communicate the urge for viewers to reconsider their role within systems that increasingly exploit land for consumption, tourism, and unchecked development, reframing nature not as a passive resource but as an endangered living entity.

Simultaneously, the work allows a space for introspection—asking audiences to examine the ever-flowing meanings that shape their own life, values, responsibilities, and perhaps, their contribution to the environment that we all inhabit. For the artist, this body of work is an “experimental opportunity in challenging viewer’s perceptions and assumptions of nature,” operating as an indirect yet urgent call to preserve ecosystems, cultural landscapes, and ancestral relationships to land against forces of extraction, commodification and erasure.

Gargonia by Jenna Bitar

Emotion plays a central role in this inquiry. A profound regurgitation of emotions waiting to be expressed. Anger, fear, grief, and hope surface back through instinctive movement, giving the work a visceral immediacy that resists detachment. Bitar’s body expresses itself in its most natural form through unapologetic, emotionally charged brushstrokes that she allows to simply take over—letting the body speak for itself, guided by an innate emotional intelligence. Like ancient practices, her process of coloring is meditative, almost trance-like, where thoughts disappear, hushing down and what remains is the residual energy imprinted onto the canvas. Throughout this process, control is deliberately relinquished in favor of trust.

Jenna Bitar.

Ultimately, Bitar reframes painting as an act of remembrance and responsibility. Documenting landscape about what has been lost and what remains possible. Each canvas opens a genuine portal to form connection through a collective pause: to listen to what the land is asking of us and that the relationship between humanity and the earth is not one of dominance, but of reciprocity.