ArtSeen
Ali Banisadr
LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS | OCTOBER 30 - DECEMBER 20, 2008
Ali Banisadr has described his painting as a translation of sound into imagery, an attempt to synthesize the visual and auditory aspects of memory. For Banisadr, these memories are derived from the first twelve years of his life spent in Tehran, where he experienced the bombings of the Iran-Iraq war. His all-over compositions are populated by distinctive, distant figures reminiscent of those found in Persian miniatures and Hieronymous Bosch’s landscapes, but they are rendered in Abstract Expressionist slashes and gestures that, when viewed up close, dissolve into lushly abstracted, layered surfaces and anonymous shapes. Often the only recognizable objects are rifles and missiles.
Banisadr’s blurring of details through surface and scale supports the material possibilities of painting. A similar result is achieved in the cryptic sexual imagery beneath Cecily Brown’s impastoed surfaces or in Daniel Richter’s more resolved figures from blots and blobs. Banisadr’s landscapes such as Black and Exxon (both 2007) also recall the swirling compositions and ambiguous pictorial space of Matthew Richie, Julie Mehretu and Inka Essenhigh’s earlier enamels. Banisadr’s paintings are medium-sized in contrast to Brown, Richter, Richie and Mehretu’s mural-scaled work; yet they accomplish remarkable shifts in scale through a miniaturist structure. These works also suggest Banisadr is at his best when he evokes the visual and auditory sensations of violence through the restlessness of his mark-making and surfaces rather than by relying on historical narratives, as he does in The Hashasins (2008).
If the sanguine sky in Amen (2008) emphasizes the violence in the landscape, then the placid blue-and-white checkered sky and orange terrain in Land of Black Gold (2008) is a move away from it. These bright, geometric abstractions leave one feeling ironically cheery and at ease. While forms such as the banner-like patterns draped in the sky of In the Name of (2008) may nod to Banisadr’s earlier associations with San Francisco graffiti culture, they risk being read as decorative.
Although the landscape paintings of Joan Miró bear little visual resemblance to Banisadr’s, their shapes also never give way to complete recognition, creating a similar tension between figuration and abstraction. Produced in the 1920s, the sense of malaise in Miró’s work reflects the political tensions that led to World War II. The instability, disorder and panic in Banisadr’s paintings, on the other hand, saliently and poignantly highlight this pivotal time in our country’s history, its staggering economic crises and foreign policy disasters.
Contributor
Greg LindquistGREG LINDQUIST is an artist, writer and editor of the Art Books in Review section of the Brooklyn Rail. He is currently a resident at the Marie Walsh Sharpe artist residency.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Ali Banisadr: The Changing Past
By Maximiliane LeuschnerNOV 2023 | ArtSeen
Imagine a reality where the future is historical and the past contemporary, where time stands still and simultaneously moves on. Ali Banisadr conjures such wondrous worlds in his paintings. By bringing the ancient into conversation with phenomena of the present and the future, he explores what stands the test of time. And the circumstances of the current exhibition itself similarly weave together distinct layers of time and space, as the Tehran-born and Brooklyn-based painter celebrates his first solo show with Victoria Miro in the British capital during this year’s Frieze Art Fair.
Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner
By Norman FischerOCT 2023 | Poetry
Larry Eigner’s work has been foundational for contemporary American poetry. What was missing was the biography, which now, thanks to the storied Modern and Contemporary Poetics series of the University of Alabama Press, edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer, we have. Jennifer Bartlett’s Sustaining Air: The Life of Larry Eigner, is a terrific book. I, as they say, couldn’t put it down, finishing it in a day, and wishing for more.
Ali Banisadr: These Specks of Dust
By Jessica HolmesJUNE 2021 | ArtSeen
In taking bits from across time and genre and processing them through his own synesthetic technique, Banisadr ultimately shucks convention, rendering paintings that are entirely new. It is a deeply intuitive process.
Blythe Bohnen: Process is Life
By Irene Lyla LeeSEPT 2023 | ArtSeen
Letters, whether they are Roman, Cyrillic, or Arabic, represented, at one time, a physical thing: a boat, or a hawk, a house, or the sun. But over time these markings, in many alphabets, have become abstracted. Now letters that line a page are mere keystrokes for what they once were. Process is Life, a show of Blythe Bohnen’s work at A.I.R. Gallery, features an early body of her paintings composed of paintbrush markings that weave within grids, rising and falling in expressive undulations with deceptive ease, the eye trying to form those shapes into letters. And even though these are not alphabetic markings steeped in an evolutionary history of culture, Bohnen’s study beside a series of loose square forms in “Brushstroke Series” (ca. 1970) offers a small key into the deep thought that went into each character appearing in the show. In the same way letters are not random shapes, these marks were well thought out. Bohnen was, above all, scientifically attentive to the motions of the world, so these compositions echo with life.
