Nasser ASSAR (1928-2011) East-West. Encounters and influences during fifty centuries of art. Oil on canvas, signed and dated "61" lower left. 100 x 73 cm. Born in 1928 in Tehran, Nasser Assar moved to France, to Paris in 1954. He discovered Chinese painting at the exhibition of the Cernuschi Museum Orient-Occident. Encounters and influences during fifty centuries of art at the end of 1958 or early 1959. His art, which could be described as dreamlike calligraphy, was then part of non-figuration and not abstraction. "In Nasser Assar's first works exhibited, those of the 1960s, one can observe a quasi contradiction between In the first works exhibited, those of the 1960s, one can observe a quasi contradiction between the gestural enthusiasm of a brush tracing in black, vividly, impulsively, the characters of an imaginary language, and neutral backgrounds (promised to become soon horizons and "skies") painted with softness and chromatically subtle: made of harmonious tints, never primary". Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat, preface to the catalog of the Nasser Assar exhibition at the Galerie Antoine Laurentin in 2018