Galerie Claude Lemand

International Biennale of Engraving of Sarcelles, France.

Guest of honour: ASSADOUR.

Lebanese and French painter and engraver. Born in Lebanon in 1943 and intro­duced to drawing in Beirut, Assadour Bezdikian, known as Assadour, con­tinued his training at the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Paris in the studio of Lucien Coutaud. His work is now part of public and pri­vate col­lec­tions in France and inter­na­tion­ally. Assadour is above all an engraver: “When I engrave, I express an ana­lyt­ical side of my tem­per­a­ment, I dis­sect the image and, with it, the thought. I’m like a sur­geon.”

ASSADOUR had his first exhi­bi­tion in Beirut in March 1964, the same year he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts. His painting is part of the Armenian frame­work: rhetoric and sym­bolism of the inte­rior land­scape, its des­o­la­tion and its man­age­ment in a frozen and repet­i­tive pain sup­ported by a tech­nical vir­tu­osity which has become the nec­es­sary corol­lary of expres­sion.

He seems to speak only of desert land­scapes and dis­jointed worlds, but in such a pre­cise, metic­u­lous manner and at the limit of read­ability which can reach the gen­eral public, that he no longer uses easy themes or the­matic vari­a­tions, but of the assembly of an inte­rior world from pic­to­rial ele­ments grad­u­ally put in place.