The Letter as a Sonata

Charles Hossein Zenderoudi is quite clear about his art and why it strikes such a strong chord with the public. “People around the world are all the same and everyone is able to read my work,” he explains. “What matters is the harmonisation between the heart of the artist and the heart of the viewer.” That there should be such pronounced empathy between creator and viewer may help explain, at least in part, why Zenderoudi was so outstanding an artist at such a young age and why he has continued to be a major player on the world stage of art for half a century.

Fast-forward almost 40 years to the brave new world of Dubai and the foyer of the Godolphin Ballroom at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel. It is April 2008 and the Christie’s Dubai International Modern and Contemporary Art sale is about to start.

Auction-goers gather to admire Tchaar-Bagh, one of Zenderoudi’s seminal works. The 210 x 195 cm artwork is remarkable not solely for its beauty but also because it is one of the pieces he created in the early 1980s when moving towards an aesthetic featuring larger elements.

Extended maze-like black and white lettering creep towards the center of the piece, where 45 colourful ha letters hold court.

Lot 59’s estimate was $200,000-250,000, yet when the hammer fell, Tchaar-Bagh had sold for $1,6 million, setting an auction record.

Yet, however much this caused a ripple through the chattering artistas, the high figure was hardly the point. Zenderoudi is not a man to be swayed by such matters.

Zenderoudi has received many accolades and won many international awards, starting at the biennales of Venice in 1960 and São Paulo in 1961, when he was still in his early 20s.

Following the 1963 acquisition by New York’s Museum of Modern Art of his K+L+32+H+4, which not only marked the first of his paintings to enter a major public collection but also served as a catalyst for other museums to follow suit, most of the world’s prominent art institutions have sought to include his works in their collections – London’s British Museum, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Copenhagen’s Statens Museum, among others.

A Curious Mind

Born in Tehran in 1937, Zenderoudi began exploring the bazaars of the Iranian capital. An independent child, he was insatiably curious and attracted especially by images, primarily posters of American and Indian films and stamps, rings inscribed with calligraphy and medallions.

“I used to spend all my savings on such things. I remember having bought hundreds of stamps made from semi-precious stones and engraved with people’s names,” recalls Zenderoudi.

He was continually wandering through the alleys of the bazaars on the lookout for objects that caught his eye. At school, his favourite class was geography, mainly because of the maps, which he would colour or make cut-outs from – an idea that, along with stamps, he would later pursue through his artworks.

Art was a passion for the young Zenderoudi; not in painting and drawing per se, but rather through a more self-experimental approach.

“I did bizarre things – prints and others – in my own way, and I discovered, later on, that I was able to do portraits or landscapes.”

Scientific theories, concepts of time and space, astrolabes and astrology, all fascinated the young Zenderoudi. In particular, a visit to Iran’s Bastan Archaeological Museum triggered the beginning of his questioning of the nature of man’s relationship with the cosmos, something that has engaged him ever since. [...] The 23-year-old Zenderoudi found Paris “fabulous”. He met artists like Alberto Giacometti, Stephen Poliakoff and Lucio Fontana and writers such as Eugène Ionesco and recalled that “the artistic and literary scene in Paris was extraordinary, with no frontiers, and I was part of it.”

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The desire to know and learn more keeps him alert. Lively, fast-moving cities are where his varied interests thrive most. “I change the process according to my feeling or by necessity. If I am, for example, in a car in the desert, I use my camera to take photographs. And these are as valid and worthy as my paintings. I always have to find a way to create and I can adapt to all sorts of situations,” he says.

Meanwhile, Zenderoudi can be funny, ironic and challenging.

His works never shrinking from saying the un-sayable – as, for instance, in one of his Saqqa-khaneh works, where he penned critical dedications to “writers who cannot write, poets who spout nonsense, philosophers who witter on about this and that, and artists who make crap.”

In this way, Zenderoudi mocked the concept of ‘intellectualism’ and challenged the prevalence of value judgements, which he felt served to obscure the real content.

Matters of Substance

Zenderoudi’s open-minded approach is one in which his conceptual drive leads him down many avenues and to work through all possibilities.

He is a painter, a sculptor, a photographer and a book illustrator. The list is constantly expanding, and his career is studded with landmark achievements. In 1973 Zenderoudi won the UNESCO award for ‘The Most Beautiful Book of the Year’, for example – a project that involved design and lithographs for the Holy Qur’an. A decade later, he created monumental works for the international airports of Jeddah and Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.

Then, in 1995, at the Bernay Museum of Fine Arts in France, he created an extraordinary work in which he spent a whole night painting and walking on a 100-square-metre canvas in one of the museum spaces, working against a backdrop of music and poetry. He mixed ancient techniques, such as the use of egg-based tempera, with vocal art expressions from more contemporary periods, and in so doing, fulfilled “an act of art, music and poetry” and created a bridge between different periods and styles of art history.

In this way, Zenderoudi has consistently worked to break codes and conventions, to disrupt the boundaries that exist between forms of artistic expression. At the same time, his works – however ornate and intricate they may appear – are invariably lean and to the point. Every component is specifically essential to the work in which it appears, and there is nothing that is superfluous or gratuitous.

In 2001, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art presented a retrospective of Zenderoudi’s work. Appropriately, the same art critic, Restany, who had encouraged Zenderoudi to move to Paris in the late 1950s, wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue. [...]

Meanwhile, Zenderoudi himself affirms: “What was written about me decades ago proves that my art has no frontiers. Do people refer to Picasso as ‘Spanish’ or Duchamp as ‘French’? It is not a matter of country or nationality. Artists are universal.”

It is surely this uncanny ability to transcend categories and definitions of art, culture, history and geography that will prove this artist’s most enduring legacy.