In the artist’s region, danger arrives from above. A Prayer to Cast Out the Sky asks for the sky to be taken away.

The film is the first part of Close the Sky to be shown publicly. The project comprises three hand-drawn animations, a series of tondo paintings in oil on canvas, 60 cm in diameter, and texts in Arabic. Lines from the poem recur across the works, hand-lettered into the drawn frames and painted across the tondos.

The drawings are made digitally, a method adopted in 2020 when the artist lost access to his studio and kept since. These were made in a rented room beside the studio and in cafes.

In the Name of the Father is a body of work in four chapters, made in Beirut in the two years around the death of the artist’s father on 3 March 2022. It retells the myth of Icarus as an account of what is handed down between a father and a son: the promise of flight, and the fall that comes with it. The work was presented as a solo exhibition at Takeover, Beirut, 18 May – 3 June 2023.

The first chapter, Paper Superman, is made from found magazine imagery — bodies from fitness and advertising spreads, cut from their pages and painted over in oil. The excision comes first: the scissors are the first brush. Freed from the page, the figures hung on thread in the exhibition, one planted on chopstick legs inside a household glass jar.

The second chapter, WIIINGS, turns from the hero to those who sell him. Its supports are found energy-drink cartons, repainted and lettered as though they were still packaging: WHO TAUGHT ICARUS TO FLY, THE CLOUDS DID NOT STOP HIS FALL, LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON, LIKE SON, LIKE COPY. The first box was picked up off a Beirut pavement.

The third chapter, Shadow, cuts the same figures again at life size, out of cardboard. Following Carl Jung, these are the shadows the paper heroes cast. Cardboard is the material of the city’s margins, the sheet a man sleeps on in the street. The shadows carry the sentences the boxes carried.

The fourth chapter, The Fall, is the retelling itself: a suite of oil paintings and an original poem in English and Arabic, written panel by panel in the sketchbooks alongside the figures. The fall is not resisted here; it is accepted and absorbed. A line of the poem is lettered across one canvas in both languages.

Leila and Jalal is a series of drawings and large paintings of the artist’s mother and father, made in Beirut between 2016 and 2018. The drawings were made from the side of the bed, mostly while they slept. The paintings came afterwards from the drawings and from phone photographs. In a house where art did not exist, the parents sat for him anyway. Awake, the father sat when asked and had no reaction to what came of it; the mother said she looked like a monkey.

The paintings are larger than life. The viewpoint is from above: the couple on their pillows, or a single head filling the sheet. Each canvas is built from one color, the drawing carried by tone alone. One gesture recurs, a fist beside the mother’s face, once in yellow and once in blue. Twice, the father looks back. The titles use the parents’ first names.

It is the only body of work the artist made while his father was alive. The canvases have never been shown.