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拍品专文
Deux mille huit cent quatre-vingt-onze, a work of 1978, belongs to a body of work supported by the Galerie Stadler in Paris. While championing body art and performance, from Gina Pane to Arnulf Rainer, which took part, together with conceptual art, in what the critics of the time called the ‘dematerialisation’ of the work, Rodolphe Stadler laid claim, in arTitudes, the review of body art founded by the critic François Pluchart, to the choice of exhibiting painting as well. In the France of the 1970s, that choice amounted in fact to a militant, indeed revolutionary, act. It asserted that a painting could carry a conceptual elaboration and pass through the debates that were then calling painting into question, not by opposing them, but by displacing their terms.
For Deux mille huit cent quatre-vingt-onze, Zenderoudi proposes an interplay of grids made up of bands whose width he makes uniform in order to systematise them and to neutralise any possible figurative or anecdotal perception of them. Likewise, the hypothesis that he might give preference, as an aesthetic choice, to the fluid play of an acrylic laid down in acidulous transparencies is refuted by the firmness and the power of the architecture that Zenderoudi gives to this structure of curved space. Vibration of numerical sequences, transparencies, erasures: variation is inscribed in the work itself, and, for want of a centre, no position allows one to dominate it. These means belong to the register that Zenderoudi defines in order to posit, in the line of Leibniz's perspectivism, that the point of view is not what varies with the subject, but the condition under which the subject grasps a variation, in Gilles Deleuze's formulation.
The title itself, Deux mille huit cent quatre-vingt-onze, is a number. Everything proceeds from there: a work that designates nothing other than the operation that constitutes it. To write sequences, to curve them, to superimpose them, is to make of calculation a space: the time of writing is deposited there as extension, and extension, for whoever traverses it, becomes duration once more, without any centre or any privileged frame of reference fixing its reading, the very condition that modern physics assigns to the observer. From then on, the opposition between painting and conceptual art, which structured the 1970s, loses its relevance. The grid and the series of minimal art, the language and the number of conceptual art: Zenderoudi's work binds these legacies together and carries them beyond themselves. In it the grid curves, language becomes rhythm and density. It is in this sense that Rodolphe Stadler's wager comes full circle: painting is not defended there against the conceptual; it becomes its ground. It is not painting that survives its contestations: it is they which, before it, change their object.
Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi was born in Tehran in 1937. From 1957, at the age of twenty, he asserted a singular approach. His pictorial work, bearing a critical position in an attitude that Fluxus would theorise a few years later, established him as the founder of Saqqa Khaneh, an avant-garde spirit that he developed from 1959 to 1965.
A laureate of the Paris Biennale in 1961, he settled in Paris that same year, then opened a second studio in New York. Also a laureate of the Tehran, Venice and São Paulo Biennales, he was championed by the critics Frank Elgar, Giulio Carlo Argan, Pierre Cabanne, Pierre Gaudibert and Pierre Restany. In 1963, MoMA acquired K+L+32+4 (1962). In 1972, a survey of art critics conducted by Connaissance des Arts placed him among the ten major living artists, alongside Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Zao Wou-Ki.
His works are held in numerous public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Villette, Paris; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds; and the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg.
For Deux mille huit cent quatre-vingt-onze, Zenderoudi proposes an interplay of grids made up of bands whose width he makes uniform in order to systematise them and to neutralise any possible figurative or anecdotal perception of them. Likewise, the hypothesis that he might give preference, as an aesthetic choice, to the fluid play of an acrylic laid down in acidulous transparencies is refuted by the firmness and the power of the architecture that Zenderoudi gives to this structure of curved space. Vibration of numerical sequences, transparencies, erasures: variation is inscribed in the work itself, and, for want of a centre, no position allows one to dominate it. These means belong to the register that Zenderoudi defines in order to posit, in the line of Leibniz's perspectivism, that the point of view is not what varies with the subject, but the condition under which the subject grasps a variation, in Gilles Deleuze's formulation.
The title itself, Deux mille huit cent quatre-vingt-onze, is a number. Everything proceeds from there: a work that designates nothing other than the operation that constitutes it. To write sequences, to curve them, to superimpose them, is to make of calculation a space: the time of writing is deposited there as extension, and extension, for whoever traverses it, becomes duration once more, without any centre or any privileged frame of reference fixing its reading, the very condition that modern physics assigns to the observer. From then on, the opposition between painting and conceptual art, which structured the 1970s, loses its relevance. The grid and the series of minimal art, the language and the number of conceptual art: Zenderoudi's work binds these legacies together and carries them beyond themselves. In it the grid curves, language becomes rhythm and density. It is in this sense that Rodolphe Stadler's wager comes full circle: painting is not defended there against the conceptual; it becomes its ground. It is not painting that survives its contestations: it is they which, before it, change their object.
Charles-Hossein Zenderoudi was born in Tehran in 1937. From 1957, at the age of twenty, he asserted a singular approach. His pictorial work, bearing a critical position in an attitude that Fluxus would theorise a few years later, established him as the founder of Saqqa Khaneh, an avant-garde spirit that he developed from 1959 to 1965.
A laureate of the Paris Biennale in 1961, he settled in Paris that same year, then opened a second studio in New York. Also a laureate of the Tehran, Venice and São Paulo Biennales, he was championed by the critics Frank Elgar, Giulio Carlo Argan, Pierre Cabanne, Pierre Gaudibert and Pierre Restany. In 1963, MoMA acquired K+L+32+4 (1962). In 1972, a survey of art critics conducted by Connaissance des Arts placed him among the ten major living artists, alongside Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Zao Wou-Ki.
His works are held in numerous public collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art, New York; British Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Villette, Paris; Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Musée des beaux-arts de La Chaux-de-Fonds; and the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg.