The Brooklyn Rail

Ali Banisadr: Noble/Savage inaugurates the new Olney Gleason gallery—the cavernous, concrete-coffered space of the late Paul Kasmin, renamed after Kasmin’s former president, Nick Olney, and his senior director, Eric Gleason. Banisadr’s paintings and luscious pastels line its walls, scaled up to monumental size, while bronze sculptures stand sentinel at center. Banisadr’s practice is figure-based, as he once wrote in a notebook: “My work is not abstract / You just can’t see it.”¹ Indeed. Banisadr’s combinatorial practice of symbolic appropriation and synthesis revels in a personal iconography of diminutive hybrid figures and ideograms that appear amid distinct units of colliding multidirectional brushstrokes. These polyrhythmic, laterally expanding compositions seem to dance in ecstatic syncopation, their visceral excitations further heightened through astute cropping, forcing Banisadr’s cacophony of aleatory asynchronicity beyond its frame.

An obsessive researcher, Banisadr immerses himself in themes and images that reach back centuries and span a variety of cultural formations. He extracts compositional armatures from the Western canon, lifts images from ancient ritualistic cults, and reinscribes Jungian archetypes to propose painted allegories and sculptural avatars that become mises en abyme of visual stimuli. Dense with pictorial incident, Banisadr’s paintings evince a kind of horror vacui, a compulsive filling-in that might well relate to early sensory trauma: he was a child during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, when “holes” were everywhere—in the aftereffects of bombings, in buildings gone missing, in emptiness where earth and grass had provided areas for play, and in unanswered questions as to the reasons for such annihilating violence. How to make sense of the fragments and absences, those irreparable negations? Banisadr would seek answers by seeing, learning, listening, and reading to feed a voracious appetite to know, to fill full, to repair. Whether by constructing genealogies or making art, he has said, “It’s me trying to desperately figure stuff out.”

And yet, in viewing these pictures, searching for Banisadr’s sources felt like an optical scanning exercise à la “Where’s Waldo?” The activity might hold viewers’ (and researchers’ and critics’) attention, but the exercise bypasses the heart of the works’ appeal. As I repeatedly orientated and reoriented myself to his picture planes and watched others do the same, it occurred to me that these paintings catalyzed a kind of somatic sympathy, a correlating vibration between the viewing audience and the pictorial events they witnessed, as if Banisadr had removed the fourth wall. He freely admits to the metaphor of a proscenium, describing his recent works as “like stages, like a theatrical stage or something.”

In Leviathan (2025), titled after the sea serpent engaged in cosmic battle between chaos and order, Banisadr organizes roiling horizontal ribbons of brushwork amid broad facets joined at their fault lines to create a careening dynamism. Fitted edge to edge, these abstract puzzle pieces effect a dystopian chaos, providing a backdrop before which hybrid grotesques emerge, masked, animalistic, their mouths distorted and teeth bared like one of Francis Bacon’s screams. Left of center, a bloated figure holds a papal ferula, as if to confer the urbi et orbi blessing. Here, however, all is reversed: holding his ferula, unusually, in his right hand, the “pope” raises his gloved left hand in a gesture of obverse benediction; he is robed in red, which in papal symbology signifies the blood of martyrs; and his face is disfigured by a pronged, scarablike mask suggesting a rhinoceros beetle. At lower right, a bearded and berobed man sits before an eternal flame, while lurking nearby is a monstrous catlike creature, eyes blazing and teeth bared. At bottom center, a helmeted figure dips what appears to be glistening linked chains (a symbolic representation of “the chain of being,” perhaps one of the many “world-building” patterns of interest to Banisadr) into the sea, while a long-necked lute rests on the arm of a seated figure above. The central action, of course, is the serpentine brushed line that wends its way through these discordant and discontinuous pictorial events.

Banisadr also understands how the experience of a composition, whether musical or visual, is guided by tonality. Like the harmony that grants resolution at the final arrival of the tonic chord, Banisadr’s underlying tonal palette resolves competing pictorial incidents in blues and violets. In Leviathan, sudden bursts of complementary yellows and greens are moments of articulation in the general scheme of surging rhythms. Dramatic, too, is the shift from tumult below to openness in the upper register, where the apex of snow-covered mountains forms a pedestal for the setting sun. A choir of supplicants rise in a single gesture, their torsos distended like saved souls. Opposite them, a ghostly royal processional seems like a nod to James Ensor’s carnivalesque Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888).

This apparent emergence from degradation to redemption has a double valence: life lived in a celestial sphere and life lived in the “cloud” of virtual reality, what Banisadr has called a “cloud world.” Rendered in high-value blue variously shot through with light, the central mountain, covered in green, also suggests the giant single tree that dominates the island of Laputa in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Castle in the Sky. Banisadr has said he feels an affinity with that film, in which a giant tree shields the child protagonists from harm. The dystopian landscape roiled by the gyrations of Leviathan signals the theme of the redemptive power of nature. But Banisadr is describing for our present age an apocalyptic chaos that we experience as enveloping and totalizing—no escape.

Omen (2025) and Pandemonium of the Sun (2025) rehearse the dystopian theme. Omen features hybrid creatures fanning out from a central vertical line comprising two stacked figures, a jellyfish-like being and a young man gazing at a flat panel (a palette? a computer screen?). Other figures engage with more recognizably human forms, including a woman at lower right, her mouth distorted in screams. At upper left a man carries a tray of lit votive candles, and below him, at the left edge, what appears to be a human figure, its legs and right hand submerged in water, peers down as if to examine the detritus that floats on the water’s surface. Could it be that the sense of shifting appearances among the painting’s composite figures—a bear? A scuba diver? A claw? A human figure bearing a black, rodentlike face topped with a feathered headdress?—signals the hybridization that results from pollutants’ disruption of sensory cues in mate selection?

In Pandemonium of the Sun, Banisadr extends his subversions of representational art, adapting strategies and intertextual dialogues that defamiliarize the scene. The firm compositional structure—a stream of continuous figuration slices the surface diagonally into halves from upper left to lower right, seeming to rend the surface in two—serves as counterpart to the theme of chaos. One might intuit another diagonal from upper right to lower left, but the central fulcrum is clearly a figure hooded with a dunce cap or more likely a sheet, as if one of Philip Guston’s Ku Klux Klan men had wandered into this scene of pandemonium. Banisadr’s action seems firmly linked to the surface, his “actors” caught up in the unending flux of brushed internal disorder. Widely read, he engaged here with literature ranging from John Milton’s epic 1667 poem Paradise Lost (Satan’s city of Pandemonium, after which he titled another work in this exhibition), to the 1985 novel Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, an author quoted in the work’s title and whom one might think of as a catalyst for Banisadr’s defamiliarization strategies. McCarthy’s mythopoetics align with the artist’s themes of violence, nihilism, and despair. This dystopian view is thematized through his rendering of the natural landscape, a mirror for him of the human condition. It’s as if he were riding with McCarthy's Glanton gang on their “tragic mounts . . . toward the red demise of that day, toward the evening lands and the distant pandemonium of the sun.”

The pairing of the words “noble” and “savage” in English comes from John Dryden’s verse tragedy of 1672 “The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards,” specifically the lines “I am as free as nature first made man, / Ere the base laws of servitude began, / When wild in woods the noble savage ran.” The idea of an innate moral superiority, a “nobility,” preceding the corrupting influence of so-called “civilized” society, was taken up in the eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who imagined a return to an innocent state of equality, morality, and abundance. In Noble/Savage, Banisadr thematizes the dynamism of the colliding forces in the title phrase through a tight network of action/reaction pairings. The broadly brushed vertical and diagonal matrix consists of opposing linearities, all within a dominant palette of green and blue. It’s as if Paul Cezanne’s forest landscapes, built up from what he described as repetitive taches placed in dense alignments, had bred with Gerhard Richter’s crisscrossed chromatic complexities: Banisadr can be said to pit Cezanne’s sensory reconstructions against Richter’s destructive pulls of his squeegee, which strike “a balance between composition and anti-composition,” as he has written. In the foreground, thrusting upward at a diagonal from left to right, Banisadr places what seems to be an airship or rocket, another action/reaction pairing, the expulsion of gas backward propelling the rocket forward. Above, in parallel, a distended shape, like one of those in Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), might be a wingless dragonfly foregrounded against Banisadr’s network of layered brushstrokes.

Enthralled with notions of the sacred and the ritual, Banisadr recruits votive objects, deity figures, and idols across cultures in the service of his sculpture. He fuses traditional process with contemporary assemblage techniques and draws his titles from heroic poetry, including the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh [2025]) and Greek heroic myth (Cyclopes [2025]), as well as from the names of Carl Jung’s twentieth-century archetypal binaries (Animus and Anima [both 2025]). The works are cast in bronze though their maquettes were originally fashioned from clay, branches, bark, and plaster. Rachel Harrison and Isa Genzken of course come to mind, in their feints toward anthropomorphic assemblage. Interesting here is Banisadr’s reinscription of elements from nature (trunk and bark) in traditional cast bronze, so that they seem to stand bereft of the life forces that once inhabited them. They are archaic icons for our age. Blank, melancholic, and resistant, these abject objects might be understood as anxious relics of a once-seeking humanity now succumbed to the excesses of mediated experience in this contemporary age of simulacra.

Finally, it seems to this viewer that the import of Banisadr’s images and sculpture is mnemonic—a prick to the memory of a shared humanity that is earthbound even as our thoughts may live in the ether of other realms. Banisadr composes theatrical tableaux in which players perform disorder and where visual chaos may also signal its reverse—a reign of cosmic order to come.