Zenderoudi, or perfecting the image

Art Absolument, n°61, 2014 — by Pascal Amel

Note from Zenderoudi Archives — Pascal Amel is a writer and art critic. In 2002 he co-founded the review Art Absolument, serving as its editor-in-chief until 2017. Devoted to contemporary art as much as to the art of the masters of the past, the review stands out for its attention to the diversity of artistic scenes and for the space it gives to the artists’ own words. Pascal Amel is the author of several monographs: Gauguin, Rembrandt, El Greco.

Pascal Amel

Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi
Solo show at Frieze Masters, London
15 to 19 October 2014

A universal humanist painter, artist of the thinking hand and existential ethics, Zenderoudi has always created works that bring together concept and perception, heart and mind.

Spotted during a trip to Iran by Pierre Restany, the art critic of the Nouveaux Réalistes, he was a prizewinner at the Biennale de Paris the following year and settled in Paris in 1961. He then participated in the São Paulo Biennial and, in 1963, one of his works was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, while his works were also shown in other significant public collections, such as the British Museum in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen and so on. In short, at the age of 25, Zenderoudi was a celebrated artist.

His aesthetic vocabulary of the time consists of repetitive, accumulative stamps, tinted photographs and cartographic maps.

[...]

With material stamps, seals and icons as complete or fragmentary elements, graphic lines, decoupage and collage, sensory perception and a spiritual quest guide the hand and the thought, the popular and the scholarly, the memory and the presence, the here and the beyond. Because, for the artist, passionate about the mystical poets of classical Persian literature – Attar, Rumi and Hafez – and the 20th-century ethical thinker Ostad Elahi¹, a work of art is not a formal conceit, still less a decoration or a commodity. It is first and foremost the medium where the “truth of being” is captured, which, by definition, goes beyond the singular to the universal.

The beautiful, the good and the true are revelations of being in all its dimensions, including the “sacred”. The philosophy of Zoroaster² resonates here, as does that of Plato and Kant. The challenge is less the invention of form for form’s sake than experimentation with the work, self-exploration, the transformation of the artist and the – hoped-for – transformation of the viewer. It is about widening each individual’s field of perception so that they can achieve a higher level of consciousness and give concrete expression to the “human universal”. This process, in which the transformation of self and society is the objective, is founded on a liberating vision of the individual. “What counts is the harmony between the heart of the artist and the heart of the viewer,” says Zenderoudi.

What counts are works that combine concept and perception, the tangible and the intangible.

[...]

Driven by his constant fascination for votive offerings, Zenderoudi painted Ce qui me conduit vers toi (1993). Here we see stamps of medals of Our Lady of Constantinople, a popular mass-produced Christian Orthodox icon, against a fertile, brightly coloured background: a chaosmos. The face of the Virgin and Jesus, or the sacred element found in every mother and child, is topped by a psychopomp bird, which is not only a protective spirit but a metaphor for the immortality of the soul. Each icon – which punctuates the flesh of the painting – is encircled by a pictorial radiance symbolising cosmic energy and spiritual aura. In the eternal struggle between good and evil, order and disorder, transfiguration makes its presence known.

Justin in the lake (1999) is a huge painting proliferated, to saturation point, with a rich texture of stamps on which the word Linthal is written. This is the name of a small Swiss town deep in a valley between soaring mountains and a hydroelectric power station. It is one of a series of paintings depicting significant or modest, known or unknown towns. Their virtual connection creates a synergy between them “for the benefit of topological ecology,” says Zenderoudi, adding, “In my absence these works maintain a semantic dialogue, which they will continue as they move from collection to collection…”. An arabesque of bright, colourful patches, humming and winged architectural facets as if viewed from the sky, crosses this all-over texture, resonating with fluid and infinite space.

From 1999, the artist experiments with the fusion between photography and painting. In Okou (2000), successive strata combine pictorial touches and photographic negatives: the place in itself is not significant. What is significant is the dizzyingly symmetrical mirror reflecting the elemental, the dreamlike intermingling of sky and earth, landscape and architecture, the coloured sensation of water as a source of life and the resonant and luminous reverberation of the image.

[...]

For him, writing is to space what notes are to music. It is not the letter that counts, but the spirit. It is not the virtuosity of the hand or the literal message that count, but the union of the body and soul towards greater Openness.

Notes: 1. Ostad Elahi (1895-1974), a renowned Iranian jurist and musician, devoted his whole life to self-knowledge and the search for “truth”. To find out more, see Paroles de Vérité, Albin Michel publications, Spiritualités vivantes collection, 2014 (translation by Leili Anvar). 2. Zoroaster, who lived in the 1st millennium BC in Iran, called his god Ahura Mazda, the creative force of the world and the four elements, water, earth, fire and air, to which Zoroastrians show the greatest veneration and respect since they come from god. He also created man, giving him free will so he can choose between good and evil.

Charles Hossein Zenderoudi in a few lines

Born in 1937 in Tehran, lives and works in Paris and New York.

Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, attentive to the theories of Fluxus, affirmed between 1958 and 1960 an artistic attitude known as “Sagha Khaneh”, a term used in his canvases in reference to the commonplace street fountains of Tehran. Breaking down formal codes, the artist multiplied the conceptual fields of his early works, linking the trivial and the scholarly, the minimalist statement and the sophisticated, the contingent and the spiritual. In doing so, he influenced generations of artists from India to the Maghreb, and his revolutionary impact endures to this day.

Despite rapid renown in Iran, he set up his studio in France in 1961. Within three years, he was a prizewinner of the São Paulo, Venice and Paris Biennials. His works entered the MoMA in New York, the French national collections and those of New York University as early as 1963. Museum acquisitions then followed regularly: the British Museum, the Centre Pompidou, the museums of modern art of Paris, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Malmö, Minneapolis, Amman, Doha, Tehran, etc. Zenderoudi collaborated with international museums and galleries, including that of Rodolphe Stadler in Paris. In 1972, he was named one of the ten most important living international artists in a survey of art critics published by the review Connaissance des arts. The TMoca in Tehran devoted a retrospective to him in 2001 with the contribution of Pierre Restany.

Zenderoudi claims total independence. In situ creations, videos, photographs and painted canvases reveal the substrate of his work. He explores questions linked to music, language, the linguistic sign, arithmo-geometric writing, memorial distance, semantic ecology, etc., in a conceptual dimension where the singular and the universal interfere.