Written by FADIA ANTAR

Assadour Bezdikian, commonly known by Assadour, was born in Bourj Hammoud, a popular neighborhood in the northern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, in 1943, to a family of Armenian origin. Early in his youth, Assadour showed a rebellious character and challenged the old traditional school system that did not adapt to his free spirit. His immediate interest in art, directed the young Assadour to take a few painting lessons with the artist Paul Guiragossian (1926 -1993) and to join the art studio of the Lebanese painter, Guvder (1923-2016). Later, he enrolled at the Italian Cultural Center in Beirut, where he was taught art under the Lebanese painter, Jean Khalife (1925-1978)^[1]. The Italian Cultural Center granted him, for two consecutive years, a three months scholarship to study at the Pietro Vannucci Academy, in Perugia, in Italy, in the summers of 1962 and 1963^[2]. At the Pietro Vannucci, Assadour was mentored under the Franciscan priest Diego to execute his first engraving. He got acquainted with the Italian Renaissance and discovered through several trips around Italy, the art of Giotto, Uccello, and many others^[3]. Assadour developed, through his Italian experience, an attachment to the drawing, while the painting was more valued at the Beirut's art scene at that time. He realized that the horizon for a painting career in Beirut didn’t fit his challenging vision that questioned the existing local art practices, in the 60s^[4]. In 1964, he won a competition organized by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, which granted him a three-year scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. There, he trained at the workshop of Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977).^[5]

In his training at Lucien Coutaud’s workshop as at the Pietro Vannucci, Assadour received a dense formal and technical education; he enhanced his natural talents with control, precision, and application in watercolor, drawing, and painting, but mostly in engraving. Paris was Assadour’s encounter with constructivism, abstraction, and expressionism, and it could be argued that each of these styles left their mark on the pupil at the time. Nevertheless, Assadour did not have one particular influence that defines his work. Art critics have attempted to decipher the inspirations of his art listing from the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, and Armenian art, to Buddhist iconography, and Western art.^[6] Although, despite their efforts, Assadour’s work cannot be exclusively linked back with any names, schools, or periods. As an outsider and an unmatched creator, his work defies all attempts at categorization.^[7]

Assadour’s challenging character positioned him against the traditional educational system and it’s hierarchy guided him to question every imposed rules and regulation. His art was a means to dismantle and make use of several sciences proving that all the enigmas in the world are not to be discovered and communicated only through traditional channels, nor do they have to deliver a preconceived single message. His canvases refer to geometry through the use of measuring scales, arrows, squares, cylinders, triangles, grids, and more; arithmetic is revealed through numbers, coordinates, and architecture in arches, domes, cubes, and pyramids. We see cosmology in the constellations of representations sprinkled on his canvases, calligraphy in the letters dispersed amid other signs and symbols, especially the letter “A,” referring to the artist himself. Meticulous like a master watchmaker, Assadour disassembles every aspect of certainty in the world, scatters it all over his compositions, voids it of its aura, and makes it accessible to all. Therefore, by demonstrating that the world is functioning on residues of traditions, Assadour clearly “demystifies the misunderstanding of the technological civilization.”^[8]

Amid the diversity in his pictorial elements, Assadour succeeded in maintaining the consistency in the construction of his works. His strong upbringing in the art of engraving gave him the technical means to reassemble his scattered vocabulary.^[9] His detailed composition is framed within thin and sometimes thick contours that coexist by being superimposed, facing each other or storming into each other’s spaces, connecting the pieces of his puzzle and creating defined arenas for the eye to collect the pictorial modules. Sometimes grids are assigned onto his composition and work as a device to create order within disorder, Assadour’s multiple architectural layouts contribute to an impression of cohesion.^[10] His work, Coupole Inclinée, 2011, part of DAF’s collections, exemplifies the dynamic composition built with diverse elements, dispersed on the canvas and contained within overlapping frames. A beam of light strikes on parts of the painting while others are bathing in darkness and shadow. Pulling unity out of dispersion, hinting on order within the chaos, are ones of the multiple antidote forces that constitute the work of Assadour and disclose its dynamism^[11]. In fact, being a lyrical and an analytical person at the same time, the artist manipulates binary formulas, black and white, lucid and enigmatic, unified and scattered in a way to involve the viewer in the action of creation, always giving him clues and potential, but never a solution. “He is the master of contradictions, of innuendos of ambiguities, of paradox, managing to create images which amalgamate opposites, are neither one thing nor the other…”^[12]

A leading engraver, confident in the strength of his craftsmanship, Assadour understands the essence of things through their mechanisms. He does not take a general idea as his starting point but builds his work from an abstraction.^[13] Lines, combinations of scratched and smooth areas, are born on his engraving plate. No prior narration is preconceived, but only the meticulous assemblies and dispatching of lines, images, and frames.^[14] However, behind the impression of narrative emptiness conveyed by the strict formalist approach of Assadour, one cannot help but detect recurrent themes related to personal and collective experiences. Among those themes, Assadour visited the subject matter of the sliding city since 1966, when he engraved his Ville Oblique, 1966. It was a starting point for several works depicting a sliding city. La Ville (1968), part of DAF's collection, is an oil on canvas that perks this theme. Clinging to a slippery land, the habitations in La Ville form a compact cohort, with no street or public square or even windows, only one door leading to entrapment, making the city hostile to humans, standing on the edge of a precipice, to predict an imminent catastrophe. Through those depictions the question of the modern dwellings is raised, besides the quality of life they provide. La Ville wasn't a cityscape void of its human inhabitants; one should scrutinize it to find, under the rubbles, between the arches, and behind the cubical forms, lying, flattened, and abstracted silhouettes. They appeared as if erased by the artist or by time, and melted within the features of the city. Following the early period of La Ville (1968), Assadour introduced the human figures and articulated them within his cosmos. They played a role in the landscape, and at the same time, the landscape appeared as a disassembled human figure. He would entitle an engraving La Voie Lactée (The Milky Way), 1975, to begin engraving his cosmological signs and forms. The outcome would be a female human figure taking part in the cosmos mechanism.^[15]

Assadour's codes and signs function within the space of the painting independently of their respective traditional references; they constitute a particular universe that unfolds through intuition more than to the intellect. Assadour empowers the viewer by providing potentials of universes to gather and re-construct; he invites him to have an active approach towards his work of art. 

The artist lives and works in Paris, France.

Notes

[1] Michel Fani, in Dictionnaire De La Peinture Au Liban (Paris: Editions de L'escalier, 1998), pp. 38-39)

[2] Xuriguera Gérard, in Assadour: Gravures, Aquarelles, Peintures (Paris: FVW Édition, 2003), pp. 8-9)

[3] Xuriguera Gérard, in Assadour: Gravures, Aquarelles, Peintures (Paris: FVW Édition, 2003), p. 9)

[4] Xuriguera Gérard, in Assadour: Gravures, Aquarelles, Peintures (Paris: FVW Édition, 2003), pp. 8-9)

[5] Joseph Tarrab, “Subsiding Ground Sliding Horizons,” in Assadour, Landscape in Motion (beirut: Sursock Museum, 2015), p. 12)

[6] Joseph Tarrab, “Subsiding Ground Sliding Horizons,” in Assadour, Landscape in Motion (beirut: Sursock Museum, 2015), p. 12)

[7] Joseph Tarrab, “Subsiding Ground Sliding Horizons,” in Assadour, Landscape in Motion (beirut: Sursock Museum, 2015), p. 12)

[8] Giuseppe Appella, Assadour (Milano: Scheiwiller, 1977))

[9] Farouk Youssef, “أسادور لبناني اخترق باريس عن طريق الفن,” Alarab UK (https://alarab.co.uk/أسادور لبناني اخترق باريس عن طريق الفن, March 20, 2016), https://alarab.co.uk)

[10] Grzegorz Sztabinski, La Nature Et La Géométrie Dans Les Travaux d ‘Assadour (Lodz: Galeria Balucka, 1991))

[11] Joseph Tarrab, “Subsiding Ground Sliding Horizons,” in Assadour, Landscape in Motion (beirut: Sursock Museum, 2015), p. 13)

[12] Fiona Dunlop, Assadour, Contemporary Visions of Utopia (Zurich: Art International 12, 1990))

[13] Etel Adnan, “Assadour: Faire Et Défaire Les Mondes,” L'Orient Le Jour, 1975)

[14] Joseph Tarrab, “Subsiding Ground Sliding Horizons,” in Assadour, Landscape in Motion (beirut: Sursock Museum, 2015), pp. 13-14)

[15] Etel Adnan, “Assadour: Faire Et Défaire Les Mondes,” L'Orient Le Jour, 1975)

Sources

Lemand, Claude. “Assadour.” Galerie Claude Lemand. Accessed May 11, 2020. http://www.claude-lemand.com/artiste/assadour-12?souspage=bio.

Youssef, Farouk. “أسادور لبناني اخترق باريس عن طريق الفن.” Alarab UK . https://alarab.co.uk/أسادور لبناني اخترق باريس عن طريق الفن, March 20, 2016. https://alarab.co.uk.

Sibony, Daniel. “Assadour.” amac -chamelieres. A.M.A.C Association Mouvement d'Art Contemporain Galerie municipale d'art contemporain, September 13, 2001. http://www.amac-chamalieres.com/expo/assadour.

Adnan, Etel. “ Assadour: Faire Et Défaire Les Mondes .” L’Orient Le Jour. 1975.

Xuriguera Gérard. Assadour: Gravures, Aquarelles, Peintures. Paris: FVW Édition, 2003.

Fani, Michel. In Dictionnaire De La Peinture Au Liban, 38–43. Paris: Editions de L'escalier, 1998.

Abillama, Nour Salamé, and Marie Tomb. Art From Lebanon. Vol. 1. Beirut, Lebanon: Wonderful editions, 2012.

Tarrab, Joseph. Assadour Landscape in Motion. Beirut, Lebanon: Sursock Museum, 2015.

Appella, Giuseppe. Assadour. Milano: Scheiwiller, 1977.

Sztabinski, Grzegorz. La Nature Et La Géométrie Dans Les Travaux d ‘Assadour. Lodz: Galeria Balucka, 1991.

Dunlop, Fiona. Assadour, Contemporary Visions of Utopia. Zurich: Art International 12, 1990.