Conversation with Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi

A.Z. Why do you prefer corpus to period?

C.-H.Z. A period supposes styles, sequences following one another chronologically. I always conduct several pictorial lines of research in parallel; temporal linearity runs against my artistic stance.

A.Z. Do seventy years of production change an artistic practice?

C.-H.Z. The answer lies in my works. Each piece is singular and yet, placed side by side, mixing era, format and conceptual aims, they are bound by the same energy.

A.Z. You photograph, you create jewellery, you have painted automobiles, a Fiat, a 2CV. Is there one gesture too many, something Zenderoudi will never do?

C.-H.Z. One artistic gesture too many? No, every work has its logic, its reason for being. As for the future, I close no path to myself.

A.Z. Your titles travel: Teczka sounds Polish, Diesseits is German, Baka and Shiraoi Japanese, Huataky and Chucavira seem to come from elsewhere. Do they have a geography?

C.-H.Z. They speak space. Space is the basic material for a visual artist.

A.Z. Cold and colder, Hot green blue: do colours have a temperature for you?

C.-H.Z. Equal temperature for all. I favour none of them: they are my partners.

A.Z. Some titles look like codes: K+L+32+H+4, SE + Se + Y + BE, RSP + ZIO. Others are lines of verse: Il y a plus ou moins d’eau dans les verres, Allons prendre le thé ensemble. What decides between code and verse?

C.-H.Z. Sometimes there are both. My titles are literary creations.

A.Z. Is it the final touch of the work?

C.-H.Z. The title is in no way a closure. It is an integral part of the work.

A.Z. How does a working day begin in your studio today?

C.-H.Z. I start early, I sometimes finish very late, every day. And I am at home to no one. That has never varied.

A.Z. Is solitude a condition of your work?

C.-H.Z. I would not say solitude, rather a single-handed crossing. I have never accepted collaboration with other artists, nor trained students, because the true condition of my work is freedom, and I have wanted to preserve it.

A.Z. One of your mottos is “never speak to say nothing”. Is silence part of your work?

C.-H.Z. I have always worked to music.

A.Z. What are your preferences?

C.-H.Z. It depends on the moments of my life. For one period I listened to John Cage’s 0'00" (4'33" No. 2) on a loop, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, and many others. Among the exceptional ones, I would say Mahler, Bach, Ostad Elahi.

A.Z. Does sound have a bearing on your creative process?

C.-H.Z. Where the music of Ostad Elahi is concerned, it is self-evident. It is more tangible in my recent pieces.

A.Z. How do commissioned works function in your work?

C.-H.Z. Commissions allow me to intervene in gigantic, functional spaces. The constraint of the useful pleases me greatly. That is what led me to carry out the commissions for the airports of Riyadh and Jeddah, or that project for the Shiraz festival whose site I wanted to protect with artificial clouds: unachievable with the technology of the seventies.

A.Z. You were born in Tehran in 1937, and you have been seen in Paris and New York for decades. Where are you at home?

C.-H.Z. I am at home wherever I can work.

A.Z. You left Iran at twenty-four, in 1961, already noticed. What does one take along at that age, and what does one leave behind?

C.-H.Z. One takes along one’s future. Leaving was a professional choice. Iran remains my native country.

A.Z. Exiled, uprooted: do these words resonate with you?

C.-H.Z. Not at all. These words are sad. Life is made of the unexpected, and everyone makes of it something of their own.

A.Z. Awarded at the Paris, Venice and São Paulo Biennales: is immediate success a gift or a trap for a twenty-five-year-old artist?

C.-H.Z. Recognition by such institutions is necessarily a gift, and I remain grateful for it. But it changes nothing in my life or in my artistic stance.

A.Z. And the market, does it change anything?

C.-H.Z. In every case, I stay concentrated on my work.

A.Z. In the 1950s, you wove critical texts into your canvases. Why?

C.-H.Z. Critical texts are a constant in my pictorial work, they are an integral part of it. It is my work as a whole that is a critical object.

A.Z. What does Saqqa Khaneh designate?

C.-H.Z. It is my corpus of works from 1957 to 1965, made in Iran and then in France. In some of them appeared the words Saqqa Khaneh [street fountains, in Iran], to which I had given a pictorial status. It was first of all, for me, a critical attitude. Two fields of reflection interested me at the time: banality, and the visual impact produced by certain artefacts.

A.Z. K+L+32+H+4, the 1962 piece held at MoMA, is it part of it?

C.-H.Z. Yes. I painted it in Levallois-Perret, near Paris.

A.Z. How did this word become the name of a movement?

C.-H.Z. In 1962, at the third Tehran Biennale, a young journalist lifted this term from my canvases and made it a generic formula. The movement was born there; I am de facto its founder.

A.Z. The works of that period have been described as “spiritual pop art” or as “popular religious expression”. Do these readings speak to you?

C.-H.Z. They do not correspond to the essence of my work. From 1957, I imposed my own approach: it was personal, attached to no influence, with no claimed reference, still less to a local or folkloric repertoire.

A.Z. Political and religious labels are attributed to you. Why does your work receive so many?

C.-H.Z. Labels no doubt come with visibility. Throughout my career as an artist, I have always sought to move away from established classifications, to draw lines of fracture rather than of filiation, so as not to follow, nor for that matter be followed.

A.Z. Are your recent works a new line of fracture?

C.-H.Z. In a way. A resistance on every front. A taking of distance too.

A.Z. In 1958, you created Who is this Hossein the world is crazy about?, a work now held in the permanent collections of the British Museum. Who was asking the question, and who answers it?

C.-H.Z. The one to whom I was asking it.

A.Z. What is the conception, the discourse of this piece?

C.-H.Z. It is a piece of youth that borders on a tour de force. I worked it in intaglio, in negative, then stamped it. At no moment did I have a visual perception of the whole: everything was pure mental operation, concept.

This work, on free canvas, proceeds from a construction of several autonomous representations, each inscribed in a rectangle, with a distinct plastic treatment. I had to keep the general unity of the work to reinforce my point. In it I evoke unity in the struggle for the True, an individual human quest and not a situated doctrine.

A.Z. How do you look at your early works?

C.-H.Z. I am turned towards the future, towards innovation. When I work, my attention is already no longer on what I am creating. I already have my vision of tomorrow. My works of yesterday are the necessary stages in the evolution of my production, and their interrelation acts continually.

A.Z. Today, AI produces images without end. Does this abundance kill the image?

C.-H.Z. It does not kill it, it calls into question the status of the original image. That question now arises from the very instant of creation: is there a work? Is it unique?

A.Z. The younger generations discover you on screens, in a few seconds of scrolling. Does a two-metre work lose something on a phone screen?

C.-H.Z. Quite the contrary. In a few seconds, an object, a work, a landscape from the other side of the world can be seen wherever one happens to be: all gain from being seen. And that in no way prevents contact, the face-to-face with the original. Each context brings a perception.

A.Z. Why Archives?

C.-H.Z. It is first of all an open door for those who wish to understand what I have done, with first-hand information. It is also, through the certificates of authenticity, a guarantee for the institutions and collectors who have placed their trust in my work.

A.Z. Your Archives authenticate, your name is a registered trademark. Does an artist’s work go that far?

C.-H.Z. Information travels fast, and shared content is not always verified with the necessary rigour; inaccuracies circulate. Documenting my artistic intentions is protecting the integrity of my work. Every profession evolves, the artist’s included.

A.Z. You exercise your moral right down to the way a work is presented. Why?

C.-H.Z. A work, whatever its nature, is inseparable from its presentation. It interacts with the space around it, physical or human, and also through the texts that present it. Its integrity is therefore a complex reality. Silence gives consent, as they say. So I speak.

A.Z. Do you stay in contact with the collectors of your works?

C.-H.Z. It is a kind of fellowship, with, for some, half a century of regular acquisitions weaving deep bonds. I do not think many professions allow one to reach, in this way, intimacy, mutual trust.

A.Z. A final word?

C.-H.Z. The one with which I mark my work every day: Zenderoudi.