The Sun Is My Only Ally is the first monograph of the franco-Lebanese artist Charbel-joseph H. Boutros. It follows Boutros's solo exhibitions at Home Works 8 -- Beirut Art Center (2019), S.M.A.K Ghent (2020), and precedes the one at La Criée Centre d'Art Contemporain (2022).
It is published by Mousse Publishing (IT), with S.M.A.K Ghent (BE) and La Criée Centre d'Art Contemporain Rennes (FR).
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros was born in 1981 in Lebanon where he grew up. He currently lives between Paris and Beirut. He is a major artist in both Lebanese and Middle Eastern scenes as well as French and European scenes. This position between two shores is central to both the development and reception of his work. In Charbel-joseph H. Boutros's work, intimate narratives are embedded with those of art, place, or the course of history, present time with traces of the past, and components of reality with the alchemy of dreams.
The monograph The Sun Is My Only Ally is the result of numerous back-and-forths and in-depth exchanges between the artist and the publishers on one hand, and between the artist and the graphic designer, Matteo Gualandris, on the other. Boutros brings to it the same precision, but also the same element of mystery as for his pieces.
The Sun Is My Only Ally includes five original texts written by artists, critics, and exhibition curators proposed by the artist (Ismaïl Barhi, Jean-Marie Gallais, Mona Mekouar, Stéphanie Saadé, Sultan Soouf Al Qassemi), as well as an interview between the latter, Sophie Kaplan, director of La Criée Centre d'Art Contemporain, and Philippe Van Cauteren, director of S.M.A.K.
Each of the five texts addresses one or several themes that run through Boutros's work: immateriality, intangibility, haecceity, matter, abstraction, night...
The interview starts from the Beirut and Ghent exhibitions to question how Boutros's Work and thought are constructed, organized, and developed.
The image section, which follows the texts, brings together a selection of 70 visuals. These visuals are mainly views of works taken from the Beirut and S.M.A.K exhibitions, accompanied by about ten images of works important to the artist but not presented in these exhibitions. It comes with a detailed list of works and a second interview between him and Sophie Kaplan, in place of images from La Criée exhibition, which, due to deferrals related to the health crisis, could not be held before publication.
he Sun Is My Only Ally also contains an original score work at the beginning of the book.