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Lot Essay
Fusing his Iranian cultural heritage with his own innovative ideas, Zenderoudi's recurring symbols and motifs throughout his oeuvre often have a particular significance and are inspired from poems, religious texts and objects. In some of his works, he simply isolates Arabic or Farsi letters, as well as numbers, in view of finding a way to intensify their artistic power and to integrate them harmoniously in his compositions.
Zenderoudi's decorative style is fused with elegance and with the artist's imagination in filling up his canvas or sheet of paper with meticulous ornaments and letters, very similar to the way his Persian ancestors decorated their ceramics, manuscripts, carpets and mosques. The variety of pigments and colour tones breathing through his works reveal Zenderoudi's almost scientific approach in his juxtaposition and structure of the composition. He strips the letters or numbers from any semantic load or context, to invite the viewer to appreciate the calligraphy's intrinsic beauty and strength. Through his complex paintings and drawings, he conveys an expressive and communicative function to his symbols, letters and numbers.
Dated 1969, Rahim stands out as being an unusual composition from that period in the way in which Zenderoudi gives it an intense movement. In this work, Zenderoudi opted for a reduced range of colours, which gives this work an almost monumental effect. The appearance of Rahim is reminiscent of a seal, recalling the theme of stamps and prints which is very common throughout Zenderoudi's oeuvre. The text shown is the bismillah, and in reference to mercy and graciousness, Zenderoudi depicts this text closing in on itself, representing mercy's universality.
Black and blue brushstrokes are quite visible in this canvas and lend it a lively appearance, distancing it from traditional calligraphy and illustrate Zenderoudi's aim to communicating through letters and of giving them a meaning of their own than simply their traditional calligraphic quality.
"Faithful to his strategy of detachment from calligraphy, Zenderoudi favours the trace as opposed to the traced in writing. To favour the trace compared to the traced is to divert the sign in order better to appropriate it."
(Pierre Restany in exh. cat., Pioneers of Iranian Modern Art: Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, November 2001, p. 26).
Zenderoudi's decorative style is fused with elegance and with the artist's imagination in filling up his canvas or sheet of paper with meticulous ornaments and letters, very similar to the way his Persian ancestors decorated their ceramics, manuscripts, carpets and mosques. The variety of pigments and colour tones breathing through his works reveal Zenderoudi's almost scientific approach in his juxtaposition and structure of the composition. He strips the letters or numbers from any semantic load or context, to invite the viewer to appreciate the calligraphy's intrinsic beauty and strength. Through his complex paintings and drawings, he conveys an expressive and communicative function to his symbols, letters and numbers.
Dated 1969, Rahim stands out as being an unusual composition from that period in the way in which Zenderoudi gives it an intense movement. In this work, Zenderoudi opted for a reduced range of colours, which gives this work an almost monumental effect. The appearance of Rahim is reminiscent of a seal, recalling the theme of stamps and prints which is very common throughout Zenderoudi's oeuvre. The text shown is the bismillah, and in reference to mercy and graciousness, Zenderoudi depicts this text closing in on itself, representing mercy's universality.
Black and blue brushstrokes are quite visible in this canvas and lend it a lively appearance, distancing it from traditional calligraphy and illustrate Zenderoudi's aim to communicating through letters and of giving them a meaning of their own than simply their traditional calligraphic quality.
"Faithful to his strategy of detachment from calligraphy, Zenderoudi favours the trace as opposed to the traced in writing. To favour the trace compared to the traced is to divert the sign in order better to appropriate it."
(Pierre Restany in exh. cat., Pioneers of Iranian Modern Art: Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, November 2001, p. 26).