ASSADOUR - Donation Claude & France Lemand to the museum of the Institut du monde arabe, Paris:
Paintings on canvas : 11
Quadriptych, 1988-2010. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm.
Très petit paysage IV, 2000. Oil on canvas, 35 x 27 cm.
Paysage aux deux coupoles, 2004. Mixed media on wood panel, 80 x 60 cm.
Composition, 2004. Oil on cardboard, 80 x 60 cm.
Composition, 2004. Mixed media on cardboard, 80 x 60 cm.
Figure, 2006. Oil on canvas, 33 x 41 cm.
Personnages polychromes avec un paysage, 2005. Oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm.
Figures in a City Landscape, 2006. Oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm.
Obélisque, 2009. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm.
Three Figures in a Landscape, 2010. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm.
Après-midi, 2010. Oil on canvas, 81 x 100 cm.
Paintings on paper : 11
7 Paintings. Technique mixte sur papier, years 1985-2007.
Tondo, 2004. Mixed media on cardboard, 34 x 34 cm.
Tondo, 2004. Mixed media on cardboard, 36 x 36 cm.
Tondo, 2005. Mixed media on cardboard, 70 x 70 cm.
Tondo, 2011. Mixed media on cardboard, 70 x 70 cm.
Etchings : 20
Gravures originales sur papier, signées, numérotées et datées, 1977-1999.
Books : 2
Issa Makhlouf, Egarements, 1993. Livre en feuilles, six gravures.
Gianni d’Elia, Salienza, non daté. Livre en feuilles, trois gravures.
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Joseph Tarrab.
Assadour has always felt the outside world, the human environment, as an aggression. To defend himself, he needs to be alone with his work as an engraver, watercolorist and painter. A work considered as a regular, precise, meticulous craft. This meticulousness is therapeutic. It brings order to his inner disorder, soothes the anxiety and distress resulting from his chronic melancholy.
As the poet does not inhabit a land but a language, the painter does not inhabit the world but painting. It is the only motherland from which no one can expel it. Painting is the inalienable Armenia-Harmony of Assadour, his paradise rediscovered? But he says he only knows hell. Let’s say its purgatory.
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Claude Lemand.
Long known as a virtuoso and master of contemporary engraving, Assadour simultaneously developed a rich and vast body of work in gouaches on paper and oils on canvas. He thus succeeded in developing his own universe, based on two movements that attracted and influenced him: Bauhaus constructivism and Parisian surrealism.
In his engravings as in his paintings, human figures and basic geometric figures have always been integrated into the sketch of an urban landscape, with architectural constructions that try to bring order to the chaos of the world as it exists. he has always felt it and as he sees it everywhere.
In recent years, he has initiated a significant change in his pictorial practice. The dominant color has changed, gray blue and black now replaces orange or combines with multiple shades of other colors, creating compositions with multiple contrasting surfaces, with perfect and controlled lighting. The main change is in the very structuring of the space: large human figures now occupy the central place of the pictorial space and have replaced the large architectural forms which organized the chaotic urban space, and the multiple anonymous figurines that the artist dispersed in the space of his works have practically disappeared.
