Ali Banisadr Paints a World in Calamity Images relentless in their toiling motion suggest a world where bedlam is the foundation
By Seph Rodney
KATONAH, New York — In calamity and in commotion — that’s where I begin when I visit Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist at the Katonah Museum. The show includes paintings that are almost 7 by 10 feet and much smaller ones, such as “Black” (2007), which, at 28 by 24 inches, still manages to stagger me. It’s composed of slashing brushstrokes of tan, reddish brown, and darker browns, with abrupt incursions of white and prowling swipes of blue-gray against a background that subtly morphs from black at the top to a smoky wheat at the bottom. Looking at it long enough I make out the skeleton of a building struck by some force that ruptures its primary beams and struts; we see the moment before total collapse, when it tosses off a tumult of bodies, timbers, paint, and wreckage into the murk below.
One famous actress, describing her divorce, said that it was like taking all the precious things in her life and throwing them up in the air. Ali Banisadr’s story includes his birth in Tehran, his coming of age during the upheaval of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), and his family’s subsequent flight from Iran at the age of 12. The conventional art historical tactic would be to bring in his biography, to posit that surely the viewer can infer from paintings such as “Black” the violence and fog of armed conflict. Possibly, we can glimpse the brutality and confusion, loss and degradation. Maybe Banisadr’s experience felt like the moment in the painting: the beloved aspects of his family and culture tossed willy-nilly into the sky to fall back to the earth in pieces. Having grown up in a chaotic house, I recognize the signs of disorder, and hate and fear its purposelessness. But artists’ imaginations are not so prosaically documentary. Banisadr makes images that are relentless in their toiling motion, conveying no root cause to this, no demiurge. Rather, he paints as if bedlam is elemental, foundational to the world.
Some of the work brings to mind the whirl and swirl of simultaneity that’s in Julie Mehretu’s paintings, but Banisadr has much more variation in style, and mostly flirts with complete abstraction rather than diving headlong into it — particularly when he simplifies his compositions. I also glimpse something like the hide-and-seek quality of Cecily Brown’s work, though his work doesn’t feel as beholden to one particular technique.
