Galerie Claude Lemand

Claude Lemand.
“As­sadour is born in Beirut in 1943, in a Lebanese-Armenian family. He went abroad at the age of 18 to study engraving and painting, first in Italy and later in Paris. Assadour is rec­og­nized as a great master in the field of engraving, and he devel­oped a renowned oeuvre of gouaches on paper and oils on canvas. His paint­ings are rare and often sought after as he did not exe­cute many.
A recur­rent theme in Assadour’s paint­ings, the fig­ures are inserted in a land or cityscape which is only sug­gested by the geo­metric lines and shapes of the com­po­si­tion. This con­struc­tivist approach refers to Assadour’s attempt to put some order to the world’s chaos, like the one he expe­ri­enced back in Beirut and just like the dis­order he still sees today, and the first of all dis­or­ders, the Armenian geno­cide. In the artist’s latest works, mon­u­mental fig­ures seem more and more to replace archi­tec­tural struc­ture and to be the core of the com­po­si­tion’s space.” (Claude Lemand)
Translated from French by Valérie Didier Hess.

Gerard Xuriguera.
“As­sadour the secret, prince of encryp­tion, with a tem­pered yet pas­sionate nature, appears as the most metic­u­lous master of images, which he inter­locks, untan­gles, clots, sep­a­rates again and finally fuses into one same sub­stance. His layout is inge­niously inscrutable yet nothing has been ran­domly placed. Everything is so pre­cise in this chaos which is very well thought out, that Assadour does not seem to destroy all the codes but rather sub­sti­tutes them with his own.” (Gérard Xuriguera)

Joseph Tarrab, The two Threats.
‘Desperate songs are the most beau­tiful songs’, says the poet. After being repet­i­tively dis­en­chanted, Assadour ends up singing. Since the start, the alter­na­tive is rad­ical for him: to sing or to die. He always felt the out­side world and the human envi­ron­ment as an aggres­sion. In order to defend him­self, he needs to shut him­self away with his own self or rather with his printer and painter’s work. His work is seen as a reg­ular, metic­u­lous, accu­rate hand­i­craft, on which many hours are spent daily. This metic­u­lous­ness is ther­a­peutic, as it puts some order to his inner dis­order and reme­dies to his anguish and grief caused by his recur­rent melan­choly. Through a mech­a­nism of com­pen­satory pro­jec­tion, the specific and sub­jec­tive dis­order clears into a uni­versal and objec­tive dis­order. By seeking to return to the world, Assadour actu­ally dis­in­te­grates it with his imag­i­na­tion. As a depraved watch­maker, whose work finds itself under Chronos’ fatal aus­pices, he dis­man­tles the real to bring him­self back.
He started decon­structing masks and faces before the decon­struc­tivist trend. He then took apart cities and land­scapes by increasing breaks, cracks, frac­tures, dis­so­lu­tion and frag­men­ta­tion. He dis­rupted the rules of grav­i­ta­tion by making heav­i­ness levi­tate and by having light­ness pre­cip­i­tating into pyramid-shaped heaps of col­lapses. He shat­tered the land reg­istry’s con­ven­tions by taking the role of a tipsy appren­tice-sur­veyor, playing with num­bers and let­ters which he deprived of any ref­er­ence or meaning and which have derailed in a uni­verse where geom­etry de-mea­sures Earth instead of mea­suring it; where reg­ular and irreg­ular poly­gons sab­o­tage the notion of con­struc­tion instead of being part of the archi­tec­tural struc­ture; where maps and plans, signs and sig­nals, arrows and direc­tions, dis­ori­en­tate instead of ori­en­tating; where the meaning of signs and sym­bols is actu­ally the absence of sig­ni­fying or sym­bol­izing, and where dif­fer­ence is in reality only indif­fer­ence.
When Bunuel was asked what his sons’ sym­bols were asso­ci­ated with, he coldy answered: ‘to nothing’. The same thing goes for Assadour: he doesn’t want to say, he says. It is up to the others to explain, to com­ment and to inter­pret – yet again, another aspect of his under­taking of demo­li­tion. A world in which nothing makes any more sense is a world over­ruled by an abso­lute dis­order, a pure chaos, the form­less con­fu­sion of origin: the dere­lic­tion, the dis­tress and the panic mas­sively trans­ferred to the exte­rior. Having caused a mess every­where, Assadour can sit down and laugh at the futility of gloss and the vanity of speeches.
Of course, his works have a meaning despite, or per­haps because, of his desire for them to not have any meaning. These works are amongst those, which reflect the best, in a mon­i­tory or rather pre­mon­i­tory way, the order and dis­order (two threats which weigh upon us, according to Paul Valéry) in which our Borgeso-Kafkaian humanity and world are entan­gled. We could also use the term: ‘assadourian’.

Joseph Tarrab, ASSADOUR. Painting / Motherland (1995)
In his works, Assadour first seeks to find tech­nical and artistic solu­tions to the graphic and plastic ques­tions he asks him­self. These solu­tions are the ones which gen­erate his lim­ited vocab­u­lary of shapes and con­fig­u­ra­tions applied: pen­ta­gram (a star with five branches), a dis­lo­cated or rather artic­u­lated cross, cir­cles, cres­cents, rain­bows, cut-outs and reg­ular or irreg­ular polyg­onal pat­terns, cross-hatching etc.
When Assadour draws a straight line, he finds it monotonous so he makes it blossom into a starry pen­tagon before com­pleting it. As he reaches its end, he needs a joint to make the tran­si­tion so he cre­ates a ges­tic­u­lating and mobile cross-shaped figure which can pro­duce either expan­sion depending on whether it unfolds itself, or con­trac­tion when it folds back. Assadour lays out an empty space which is too empty according to him, so he decides to add a circle or a star, and so on. With the help of these simple ele­ments and these geo­met­rical atoms, his aim is to suc­ceed in drawing up a time/space, ambiguous and with sev­eral mean­ings through dis­crep­an­cies and dis­con­ti­nu­ities of planes and col­orful areas, a pro­ce­dure which goes back to the Safavid minia­tur­ists.
In the oil paint­ings, these dis­con­ti­nu­ities create ranges and planes which lean over, topple, cap­size and get wrecked, sliding out from the canvas’ edges, as if being weighed down by their fig­ural and chro­matic den­sity. The world seems to be scat­tered in a thou­sand pieces, with each piece care­fully laid out and painted. There is a human puppet trapped in it, who is one ele­ment amongst others and who strug­gles, runs, ges­tic­u­lates or takes the posi­tion of a cru­ci­fied person, and this world then dis­in­te­grates, drag­ging bodies and goods in the depths of noth­ing­ness. A desta­bi­lizing anarchy which has been bril­liantly and clev­erly orga­nized by its author con­demns the defeat of an unstable and almost anti-cosmic world to dis­ap­pear. This leak is no other than the flow of time, where each moment, each image and each thought slip out from the realm of con­scious­ness.
It was unavoid­able for the work to not be devoid of a meaning: despite their tech­nical aspect, the pen­tag­onal star and the cross are a couple of exam­ples amongst others which are very ancient archetypes, much too embedded in History and sym­bolism to remain neu­tral. Among the rich plu­rality of their meaning, they sym­bolize an accom­plished man, body, spirit and soul, who has regained his radi­ance.
Assadour’s tech­nical reflec­tion there­fore trans­forms itself into an almost spir­i­tual med­i­ta­tion, unex­pect­edly sim­ilar to that of the Arab artist-geo­me­tri­cians whose com­plex arabesques were a rep­re­sen­ta­tion for the Perfect Man (“Al Insan Al Kamel”). Hence some new tex­tured colors appear on his palette, such as gold-, copper-, silver-, and car­borundum-dust. The way in which he paints these flat col­orful areas recalls the minia­tur­ists’ tech­niques as well as the fur­rowed pat­terns in Japanese Zen gar­dens, the latter being the most emblem­atic place for med­i­ta­tion. These ele­ments reflect Assadour’s Middle Eastern illuminator’ characteristic, just as he admitted himself. He has no choice as he is trapped by his own formal and chromatic vocabulary of which the significance always ends up transcending the original purpose designated by Assadour.  Theseassadourian’ views are coherent as he is always fully aware of how he pro­ceeds.
Furthermore, the notion of coher­ence is reaf­firmed through his water­colors’ formal struc­ture, which in a sim­ilar yet dif­ferent way than in his oil paint­ings, cre­ates a play between oppo­sites: high, empty, light, ethe­real, bear­able against low, heavy, full, dense and suf­fo­cating. All the ele­ments, which pile up at the bottom, attracted by the forces of gravity, being caput mor­tuum’, waste, rubble, debris, levi­tate freely in the air at the top.   It is as if there were two worlds, a mate­rial and a spir­i­tual one, of which the limits are defined by shade and light, trans­parency and opacity of the colors (burnt Umber and Sienna, ochre, purple, brown, beige, gold, copper, brick color, blue, with red, orange and yellow), infre­quency and abun­dance of signs, silence and loquacity and by opening and closing. This medi­a­tion on the being, with its light­ness and heav­i­ness, spreads out over a frame­work made of isosceles tri­an­gles fol­lowing the lines which have been traced by the folding and unfolding of the paper used as the art­work’s sup­port.   The under­world is not entirely lost for Assadour as the white areas and win­dows allow infil­tra­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion between both worlds despite their seg­re­ga­tion. In one of his paint­ings, there is even a tiny ladder, as if depicted to escape from the prison of shapes and colors. Despite every­thing, it seems that hope still exists, even within the darkest night. It is normal: does art not drive out yet call upon theassadourian’ demons and does it not rescue the artist by let­ting him recreate the Creation after having de-cre­ated it ? Is this `de-cre­ation’ not one of the main exer­cises prac­ticed by the high spir­i­tual tra­di­tions? In any case, it is not the hope to escape from the painting for Assadour: just as the poet does not live on a planet Earth but rather in a lan­guage, the painter does not live in the world but rather in a painting. It is the only moth­er­land from where no one can be evicted. Painting is Assadour’s inalien­able Armenia-Harmony, per­haps his par­adise once lost and now recov­ered ? Yet he says that he only knows Hell – let us call it his pur­ga­tory.

Translated from French by Valérie Hess