Assadour

Born in Beirut into a Lebanese-Armenian family in the suburb of Burj Hammoud, Assadour Bezdikian, known as Assadour, took interest in drawing at a very young age. His exceptional talent gave him the chance to pursue his practices in engraving and painting, funded by scholarships supported by the Italian Cultural Centre in Beirut and the Lebanese Ministry of Culture. His first training abroad, debuted at eighteen, was at the Pietro Vannucci Academy in Perugia, where he spent the summer months of 1962 to 1964, followed by a continuous period of study from 1964 to1970 under the painter and engraver Lucien Coutaud (1904-1977) at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he has been established since.

Bezdikian is mostly known for his engravings, despite having also developed a renowned œuvre composed of gouache and watercolour on paper, as well as tempera and oil on canvas. Overall, his works create a realm that flirts with Surrealism, in many ways, much like that of his mentor Coutaud, where extremely complex and detailed imagined landscapes are punctuated by objects dislocated in space, or by other minuscule ones suspended in the air. This results in a world composed of various disarticulations. At times, the objects in his compositions emerge from human heads, emblematic of the nature of Assadour’s complex imagination. His palette is composed of discrete colours that are applied flatly, although he occasionally simulates three dimensional surfaces with a play of light and shadow that creates a delicate sense of translucence.