Assadour

Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1997)

This work is in very good condition. The colours in the catalogue illustration are accurate.
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“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, 2003

Assadour is an artist who meticulously paints his dreams, covering his canvases with narrative symbolism set in the context of improvised tales. Definitions, boundaries, and tensions are rendered with surgical precision, as Assadour seizes these dreams, fluidly reconstituting them in an atmosphere of playful geometry, and saturates them with spiritual symbolism. Parisian Surrealism and Bauhaus Constructivism are fused together to create Assadour’s powerful and unique visual language. Highly revered as a graphic artist who has worked with some of the best writers and poets in Europe, as well as a genius of exploring the medium of gouache, Assadour’s canvases are rare and highly sought after. 

Painted in 1995, Assadour’s Figures in a Landscape, conveys a beautiful universe of people and mythical characters adjoining a space filled with numbers, geometric forms, signs, bits of machinery and disjointed elements. A composition of order and chaos, and simultaneous construction and destruction, Figures in a Landscape is an eternal game of opposites which mesmerizes viewers. Assadour covers the canvas with innumerable clues, some identifiable, others in a seemingly hidden code. These appear fleetingly, silently inviting comprehension but immediately retreating before definition. Assadour‘s constructivist approach skillfully puts some order into the world’s chaos, similar to the artist’s experience back in Beirut and similar to the disorder of today. Assadour’s Figures in a Landscape pushes our powers of analysis to the limit, while simultaneously creating a mythical and powerful composition.