Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, London


Born in Tehran in 1928, Nasser Assar is one of the most seminal protagonists of the Iranian modernist movement. His works mark both a compositional departure from the academic formalism of the turn of the century, and a clear thematic circumvention of the dominant neo-traditionalist orthodoxy of his time.

His migration to Paris in the 1950s coincided with a critical juncture in the progression of European modernism. Still in its infancy, the French post-war art scene eventually gave rise to the establishment of Tachism and Lyrical Abstraction, movements which heavily influenced the work of Assar. However, whilst operating alongside luminaries such as Tapies, Fautrier, De Stael and Wou Ki, Assar still developed a unique and distinctive style of abstract expressionism which was neither derivative nor imitative of his European counterparts.

Assar's canvases are wrought with a strong sense of conceptual duality derived from the inner-collation of calligraphy and landscape. Taken compositionally, Assar's depiction are built up of pseudocalligraphic oriental letterforms set in an ethereal, polytonal landscape. Yet within the composition itself, letterforms and natural forms are inseparable, having seamlessly permeated their surroundings. This unrestricted oscillation between world and environment, aside from being technically progressive, itself serves as an aesthetic device for the expression of a far more profound artistic impulse whose genesis is found in the Zen calligraphy whose influence is so evident in Assar's work.

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, performing calligraphy, or hitsuzendo, is a meditative practice seminal towards the attainment of spiritual unity with the divine. In light of the universality of his practice, the language in which the calligraphy is composed becomes irrelevant, and Assar's choice to diverge from his native Persian, far from being an act of disregard, is merely an aesthetic affirmation of his belief in the transcendental and universal characteristics of divine truth. Concurring with the Sufi tradition, this entails an understanding of the world which treats worlds, languages and systems of communication merely as names and symbols for illusory, transient, material objects, which cast a deceptive veil of sense experience over the unified, absolute, and singular underlying spiritual reality.

It this underlying reality which Assar attempts to penetrate, by demonstrating that the material landscape of our world is purely an artifact of our linguistic habits, and not a source of absolute truth. This is all achieved within an aesthetic which is both technically proficient and visually diverse, and whose freedom of hand evolves a spontaneity which is at once expressive and unrestrained.