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ALI BANISADR Press Highlights 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Ali Banisadr: These Specks of Dust JESSICA HOLMES JUNE 2021 Ali Banisadr, Red, 2020. Oil on linen, 48 x 60 inches. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York. Time and again, across the body of artist Ali Banisadr’s work, a viewer witnesses in his paintings a thing that might approximate a real thing, or a being, or a one, which might resemble a someone, or a body, or a person. But then again, upon a second look, maybe not. This initial perplexity is in part due to the artist’s vast accumulation of references—from the art historical (Hieronymus Bosch, Lee Krasner, Persian miniature paintings, to name a select few), the cinematic and pop cultural (both Star Wars and Akira Kurosawa come to mind), and the literary (The Epic of Gilgamesh and Dante’s Inferno have been sources of inspiration)—that surface in his work. The title of his current exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, These Specks of Dust, is itself an allusion to a Goya etching from the 1799 “Los Caprichos” series. Banisadr’s process may also contribute to the viewers’ frustration in their attempts to conclusively define, or name, what they are seeing. He composes his works through a form of listening: every color, shape, and brushstroke relate to a sound for Banisadr, resulting in a finished canvas that is really a virtuoso orchestration of paint. 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. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Nearly all the works at Kasmin were made over the past year, when Banisadr, like most of us, was living under lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Red (2020) stands out in the gallery for its urgent color palette, the top half of the canvas awash with a tomato-hued sky, speckled with white marks. Below this sky is a thrash of indeterminate energy compacted into the lower half, a spatial turbulence that recalls those earliest, bewildering days of sheltering in place. In fact, the painting was completed in March 2020, just as the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic was becoming apparent, and one can’t help associating these dots with the aerosols and droplets we’d all so soon come to fear. Elsewhere, a painting titled Only Breath (2020), though much smaller in scale, conveys the heaviness of the moment in the somber, downward thrust of Banisadr’s brushwork and the deep shades of purple from which the nebulous, trembling creature at the center is constituted. Not only does Banisadr’s title reference respiration (the bodily function most directly under attack by coronavirus), it also alludes to a poem of the same name by 13th- century poet Rumi, selected lines of which include: “I am not from the East / or the West, not out of the ocean or up / from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not / composed of elements at all. I do not exist, / am not an entity in this world or in the next … / My place is placeless, a trace / of the traceless. Neither body or soul.” Ali Banisadr, The Messenger, 2021. Oil on linen, 72 x 160 inches. Courtesy Kasmin Gallery, New York. The Messenger (2021), the epic nucleus of a painting that centers the show, creates a milieu that somehow feels simultaneously both familiar and alien. An array of ghostly figures whorl across the two-paneled work (Banisadr’s first diptych in six years), befogged presences that nonetheless orchestrate a brisk, definitive energy that anchors the painting. Helical shapes float amidst them, and one can’t help but confer the work’s title upon these forms, whose structure mimics the messenger RNA (mRNA) of which our COVID vaccines are constituted. A deep red sun presides over the painting’s entirety, though whether it rises or sets remains unclear. At the lower center, a green- clothed creature breaches the divide of the diptych, as if this wraithlike character is in mid-journey, leaving behind one world to enter another. For the past year, much like the specter crossing the demarcation line of The Messenger, we have all been leading a liminal existence. Banisadr’s works seem to form a narrative that we are just on the edge of grasping, which might be an especially apt allegory for these strange days of tentative reentry from our bedrooms and backyards back into public life. His paintings of accretion synthesize into something we feel we understand bodily, though the mind may not fully grasp it intellectually. The brain always desires to take over, trying to organize. Perhaps better to encourage it to rest, and allow for the thrill of being swept away as we emerge from the world we’ve just left behind to enter another. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Ali Banisadr’s Vibrant Paintings Created During the Pandemic Debut at Kasmin With a highly distinctive visual language, the Iran-born New York-based artist draws on an encyclopedic knowledge of art history to respond to the world around him LUCY REES MAY 21, 2021 Ali Banisadr in his studio. PHOTO: COURTESY OF KASMIN GALLERY For some artists, inspiration can come from the most unexpected places. In the case of Ali Banisadr, it was his COVID-19 vaccine shot that helped him overcome a plateau he had reached with a painting that was due to be the centerpiece of his debut exhibition at Kasmin Gallery in New York. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com “After having my second shot, I slept the entire day and was experiencing these intense dreams,” the artist tells Galerie. “The next day, I woke up and I had this sudden urge to paint—a burst of symbols in my head. I headed straight to my studio and I painted non-stop until night and finally finished the piece.” Ali Banisadr's studio in Brooklyn. PHOTO: COURTESY OF KASMIN Created in his signature abstract style, the piece, titled The Messenger, is a densely populated 13-foot-wide painting in two parts. It depicts a flurry of intense movement and gestural floating figures pierced by sharp needle-like lines. “I had been reading so much about mRNA technology and what it means,” Banisadr says. “I’ve also been fascinated by this idea of gene editing and all this new technology from the last year. Somehow that symbolism worked its way into the painting.” The Messenger, 2021. PHOTO: COURTESY OF KASMIN 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com On view through June 26, the exhibition is titled “These Specks of Dust,” in homage to Francisco Goya’s 1799 etching from the Los Caprichos series. It features nine recent paintings, several of which were included in the artist’s presentation at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. Banisadr, who was born in Tehran and is now based in Brooklyn, is highly receptive to the world around him thanks in part to his experiences of synesthesia. A condition shared with the likes of Wassily Kandinsky, it allows one to see sound and hear color—a curious intermingling of the senses that can be felt in his vibrant paintings. Capturing Banisadr’s deeply personal inner visions as well as a collective recording of our turbulent times, the works on display essentially track the trajectory of 2020. “The symbols kept presenting themselves to me. It had to do with everything that was happening.” Ali Banisadr, Red, 2020. PHOTO: COURTESY OF KASMIN The earliest painting in the exhibition, Red, created in March 2020 at the outset of the pandemic, is perhaps the most ominous. With an icy blue moon atop a blood-red sky, it is an apocalyptic vision of what was to come. “Something was in the air and I was attune to it before the pandemic had really begun,” he says. Small white dots are sprinkled across the surface, recalling stars but also droplets of a virus spreading through the air. Caravan (2020), meanwhile, depicts the feeling of helplessness and lack of mobility as a pair of legs are caught in the spokes of a turning wheel. “I wanted to capture this energetic movement of the figures and then the sensation of being stuck. Everything was suddenly on pause.” Last summer, Banisadr created Only Breath, a small but powerful painting, around the time of the Black Lives Matter protests and the nightly fireworks in Brooklyn. “It reminded me of being a child in Iran during the Iran-Iraq war and waking up in the middle of the night and feeling those vibrations,” he recalls. “There was a palpable nervous energy.” 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Ali Banisadr's studio. PHOTO: COURTESY OF KASMIN Driving Banisadr’s practice is an encyclopedic knowledge of art history, literature, and philosophy, references of which can be read in each work. His sprawling, light-filled studio, is filled with books and research material. Lining floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are tomes on everything from miniature painting to Bruegel and the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch, who has always been a huge influence, as well as Dante Alighieri, Rumi, and Andrei Tarkovsky. “I have a group that I circle around and I always go back to,” Banisadr says.

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