Chaos and Calm: Ali Banisadr at the Katonah Museum of Art The artist’s first US survey exhibition travels between various periods in his poetically abstracted lexicon
By Osman Can Yerebakan
The wind blows from all corners in The Alchemist, Ali Banisadr’s first survey exhibition in the USA. It is not just the mighty gusts of wind cutting through the upstate New York hamlet that might howl across the show’s paintings, drawings and sculptures at the Katonah Museum of Art. In the Iranian-American artist’s turbulent semi-abstractions and confronting figurations, the whirlwinds of time and place sweep and storm. Procession and instability combat each other in oil on linen paintings with no eventual winner; failure is also the sole outcome of a search for serenity. Banisadr’s universe, however, does not compromise hope: the task at the viewer’s end is to seek the snippets of sunshine through the density of paint and disarray.
Organised by the museum’s director and chief curator Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, the repertoire on show dates as far back as 2006. The paintings from nearly two decades ago are rather hospitable to figures and light. Bright blue skies and delightful earth are subjects of Things Fall Apart and The Center Cannot Hold (both 2007). Apart from their downcast titles, the paintings contain luminosity in hue and mise-en-scène: the sun emanates from the sky, washing mortals engaging in trivial patterns. Even angels hover above the mundane landscape in which flowers also dare to bloom. There is, however, also Black, which the Brooklyn-based artist painted in the same year. In lieu of the bygone spring, he populates the surface with poetry of a collapse, a beautiful pile of debris in the aftermath of an unknown catastrophe. Down from the rubble, people descend into a hungry mass of water.
Five years later, in 2012, Banisadr painted It’s in the Air, a massive 208 x 305 cm statement of emotional typhoon. The sky here is occupied by mad birds, clapping their wings to cheer for the insanity below. There, a tempest prevails on the blindingly green grass – rush is in place and an unavailability of shelter. The artist’s technical command blossoms into disarmingly delicate gestures of contained delirium. Those who allow themselves to be absorbed by the cacophony notice his impossibly crafted strokes: in what all feels like a blink, he embodies wind, shock and escape. Each touch of paint seems like an utterance, either a barely recognisable word or a simple cry.
