Assadour, Assadour Bezdikian, known as

Beirut, 1943

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Assadour had his first exhibition in Beirut from 6th to 18th March 1964 – the very same year he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux–Arts.

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His painting sets in the Armenian frame: the rhetoric and symbols of the interior landscape, of its emptiness and its attention to an unshifting, constant pain, supported by a technical virtuosity that becomes the necessary corollary of expression. He seems to speak only of deserted landscapes and of dislocated worlds, but in a so precise and meticulous manner, at the edge of illegiblility for the general public, that he no longer plays with facilitating themes or thematic changes, but with the assembly of an interior world, by the progressive setting of pictorial elements. 

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In his art, the geometry of the world is corrupted in order to leave space for an insignificant Waste Land and to a non-theological finality – almost without redemption except, perhaps, through the hysteria of technical accuracy, as a way of filling in the emptiness of disaster, without knowing if it is in front of you or behind. With his metaphorical ruler and compass in hand, he measured some prefabricated nightmares that lost their character to become exercises and variations on the nightmarish dimension of etching, and of a world frozen in an irreparable seizure by the act of drawing and painting. 

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His precision widens the distance, as well as this feeling of accuracy, of a topographical plan in which meticulousness develops further due to the absence of characters inherent to the scene. For scenes are never set, as one would describe a table or theatrical piece. Everything is deserted, and if the viewer of the etching is upset to be abandoned, it is because there is nothing for him to get his teeth into, except the technical perfection of the traces.

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In his oil paintings, Bezdikian attempted to overcome the problem of virtuosity by using an airbrush to cover large surfaces, and also by an excellent layering technique that had the effect of color covering the surface like lava from a mental Pompeii.

To solve the problem of how to access art, Assadour brought the solutions of an achievement-oriented technician who competed with the artist. Mechanical work and craftwork consisted of seeing oneself as a precision instrument, which was a way of introducing gloomy enjoyment, and of turning painting into a conjuring illustration of an interior desertification. 

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Assadour took some drawing lessons with Guiragossian. While recognising the talent of his pupil, Guiragossian couldn’t take him further without steering the young man towards what belonged exclusively to him: the expression of popular classes, poverty, wandering and, above all, the ambition to access the level of Beiruti society that could buy his canvases. Assadour had a taste for painting and drawing, and doggedly pursued a way of finding a cultural trace of it, having no other choice but to connect it to some practise.

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He would rapidly become aware of the inaptitude of the technical methods at his disposal in Lebanon, and even of those he hoped to find elsewhere, when he enrolled on a correspondence course – while practically still a child – at the Ecole ABC du Dessin in Paris. He also measured the social inadequacy of the Armenian and Lebanese circles to which he could access. At this time did not refuse the approach that Guiragossian proposed, but he wanted something else, without knowing what that might be exactly. Moreover, in the mid-1960s, Guiragossian had not yet attained the notoriety that would one day be his.

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Assadour enrolled at Guvder’s studio, and then at the Italian Cultural Institute of Beirut where he studied Italian and attended the painting classes run by Jean Khalifé. He came first in the end-of-year competition, and won a scholarship to spend three months in Italy. For him, this was the beginning of a much-needed separation. It did not consist in the social ascent hoped for by the Armenian diaspora. His motivations were linked to an immense and profound distaste – first with what he would become if he stayed in Lebanon, but also with a requirement and ambition that made Paris appear as a unique point of reference. Paris was the only accessible, poetic “elsewhere” within reach of the Lebanese. The sociological approach is not the only answer to the complex question of Armenian identity, but also of the issues raised by exile, the examination of art history, contemporary art, and how to respond to it while keeping questions and answers as open as possible. Coming from a community that was reticent to integrate, in exile he lived as if he was faced with inescapable indecision and choices always postponed. 

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In his own way, Assadour questioned and resolved the problematic of Lebanese painting, with a will to go further than the Armenian cultural – and therefore socio-denominational – game, and than the Lebanese social game, that he challenged while being aware of its stric limits. 

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His Parisian strategy was to rely on Beirut for a few exhibitions. What settled him in the milieu of Parisian etching had less to do with exhibitions than with a gradual entry into the art market, first through the La Pochade gallery on Boulevard St Germain and then through gradually expanding his contacts and sales.

His mental universe was modelled on 1960s and 1970s Paris. This put in place the mechanisms that led to his break with Lebanon. At the time Beirut represented nothing but rejection and bad memories for him.

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His first stay in Italy in 1962 makes us wonder how an Armenian understood the Italian Renaissance : undoubltedly as the Venetian Mekhtiarists, for whom Italy was not only a refuge but also a means of understanding and making Armenia understood.

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For them, a mythic Armenia existed as little as a real Italy – but only an island open to the sea breeze, where they lived in the memory of forced seclusion. The Mekhtiarists were destined for transmitting the theology and rites of Saint Gregory the Illuminator to seminarists, a guarantee of identity, and, with their Latin neighbours, were concerned with maintaining this proximity in which art does not try to relieve the world’s distress, but attempts to contribute to the embellishment of worship and to the elevation of the soul.

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There were no painters on the Venetian island of San Lazzaro where the Armenians installed themselves, because Italian painting proclaimed in every possible way that every plastic message and meaning was exhausted, and that it was inconceivable to compete with such virtuosity. 

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Despite a need to open up to the outside world, one of the principal characteristics of Armenian painting is its manner of closing-in on itself, not only in the way that it searches and assimilates, but also in the way that some painters copied one another with no other intention but to clarify what seemed to them an earlier and contemporary experience. Armenia’s only interest is in living the path of the anti-exile, more than the path of the exile or estrangement. The sense of the motherland carries all meanings away, which are not only linked to the need to survive, but to a way of constantly forestalling the irreversible while only occupying oneself with daily routines – by cultivating the earth in some way rather than digging one’s own grave in it. For exile displaces these two links to the motherland, the field and the tomb. Armenia adds to that a fierce energy that is not only physical, but derived from the absolute need to live, to pass things on and not just accumulate them.

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In Italy Assadour learned the lesson of rigor in drawing and in the game of influences. The choice of etching obliged him to radicalise the problem of form and also to be open to the contemporaneity of his first social environment – the Beirut Armenians – and then the public from other communities. He had deciphered his predecessors – Guvder, Guiragossian and Khalife – as well as Lebanese painters of the 1950s and 1960s.

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He took in turn the old erratic examination of identity, the sadness of Armenian exile and the distress of Lebanese exile – by living as if he was a depersonalised but present machine. He did not paint a mechanical world but a projection of this world, the effects of assembly and disassembly in every possible situation. Derisory skeletons of the time, of a metromania where the objective was not to educate or to remember but to make visible a weary and neurotic autopsy of all the elements that were turned into symbols, between sign and catalysis. Is the British stamp of Queen Victoria’s silhouette a victory of philately, a souvenir of a journey, or is philately an alternative to travel? The graduated measurements of life, the empty metronome of time, is linked to deculturation above all. 

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If Assadour seemed to want something, it was not to return to a lost land, but to set the milestones of an unhoped for cadaster, with the certainty of hopelessness, where narcissism holds on to reality through minutia. 

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We can only refer to what this talented artist said about his solitude and distress, both shy and conquering in front of Europe, and who had to and wanted to live from his painting and felt he had to proceed to serious matters.

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The stakes of oil painting implie tension, a hardening through technical virtuosity; it is a way to go rapidly to the space needing to be colored and to the montage of signs of distress, a cryptic semaphore of a personal vocabulary that, for the spectator, is the stylisation of something he does not understand. In his virtuosity, Assadour builds reduced models, where he dominates all the space of human figures and signs. The projections of the self allow him to thwart and to distance his contempt for an aesthetic of necessity. He does not always escape from the repetition of disaster and of confinement, from this neurasthenia of the engraver, a ploughman without a fertile soil, placed in front of a large metal plate condemned to bear signs, burned by acid, blackened with colors of a melancholia understood as the mourning of colors.

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Essentially, Assadour never ceased to repeat that the world was useless; all of his painting attempted to demonstrate this. However, the pain and distress of exile prevented him from being embalmed by technique ; while other painters had to learn to keep this pain quiet by reassuring themselves, by the acceptable quality of a craftsmanship of likeness and drawing.

 

It was impossible for them to go further in societies where the loss of resemblance appeared as a loss of image, mirroring and identity. With all meaning lost, where can the artist be reflected if not in the foolishness of no longer having a recourse ? Because this was the most formidable threat : returning to exile without a mirror or a face. And to what exile, moreover, since everything was lost? Assadour achieved a language of autonomous signs, but what was more striking – which was neither a literary approach nor a plastic refusal – was this world of signs that enclosed around the only meaning conferred by the painter. He is not reproached for the absence of meaning or the danger of oneirism or of gloss, but this impossibility of an accessible meaning. Is it necessary to oppose an open meaning with a closed meaning? There is no clear and direct decoding here of something that should be transmitted, or of a justification of a meaning that could stand alone, by the logic of what makes it work as a painting.

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Assadour built his world on a symbolism of his own, whose necessity he pushed to the limit. The real question to ask about him is : why does this world seem to behave as a pictorial construction? Because he understood that a canvas builds itself with pictorial elements, and therefore a vocabulary and a personal mental connection, or vision. Saved from rhetoric by the practise of etching, he was able to articulate himself around his discipline and technique. Oil painting and the canvas had accustomed too many Lebanese painters to the spinelessness of the vague, as oil is malleable and can lend itself to artistic easy options, leading for the most part to unexpressed imagism. In such canvases, one finds more chitchat than work.

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Assadour Bezdikian or the terrible corruption of the geometry of the world, perhaps because it does not do him justice. A wasteland and a derisory world, disorder created with elements of geometry and rhetoric taken from the Renaissance. There is also a mannerism that is paralysed by the dizziness of geometry, rather than offering a way-out in the illusion of a world diverted into the image of the Passion, the tortured body. With Assadour, there is the distant echo of Renaissance mathematical research, a formalisation of the need for an ordered world.

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He created religious paintings with the whole Armenian foundations, but without its theology; a theology without eschatology and eschatology without the metaphysics. In the end, his Armenian background does not provide any religious assistance, but the path to another religion: painting as the only ritual, the only exercise and only purpose.

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This is how one must understand the tortuous watermark where the apparent meaning and the real meaning for the painter are often only linked to a manner of contemplating the meaning of the words. As for the meaning of the world, Bezdikian saw it as diverted from its object. His painting were there as if to speak about this paradox: the fog and the extreme precision of etchings in drypoint and acid, the “I do not come from where I come from, I come from elsewhere. I do not come from where you think but from somewhere better.” Because for him, this paradox was his way of looking.