Nasser Assar is a multidisciplinary, and even a multicultural, artist; he introduced fresh independent experiments into Iranian Modernism on the one hand, and displayed aspects of Far Eastern and French art in his work, on the other. A book recently published in France introduced Assar as a “French artist with Iranian roots”.[1] It seems that while the artist lived most of his life abroad and had a profound multicultural experience, his career also led him to a greater universal movement rather than mere Iranian Modernism.
Well-known works of Assar, including the one displayed in the auction, evoke the art of the Far East more than anything else. In other words, his familiar visual language highlights features of Far Eastern art, including periods of Chinese and Japanese painting, to enable him to practice a different personal style of landscape painting. Most of his work can be categorized as landscape painting; works that were created through a fluidity of diluted paint and application of spatial perspectives. The atmosphere of such paintings often evokes Romanticism and Oriental mysticism. This is an extremely easy yet difficult style of painting, i.e. addition or deletion of a mere patch of paint can change the composition and visual qualities of the work. In the same way that elements of the painting can come together to create a scene, they can easily break apart, especially when the gap between landscape painting and abstraction is reduced.
Nevertheless, the unique qualities of Assar’s work make his purely abstract paintings perceived as landscape paintings. In fact, such unique personal accomplishments in art has inspired major critics and researchers such as Herbert Read[2], Yves Bonnefoy, and Julien Alvar
[1] Nasser Assar, by Yves Bonnefoy and others, Edition Manucius, France, 2016.
[2] Herbert Read wrote a commentary on an Assar exhibition at Lincoln Gallery, London, 1961