ALI BANISADR Press Highlights 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Ali Banisadr Benaki Museum CATHRYN DRAKE APRIL 2021 Ali Banisadr, Rhizome, 2019, oil on linen, 48 × 60". The seventeen paintings and prints in Ali Banisadr’s exhibition “Ultramarinus: Beyond the Sea,” curated by Polina Kosmadaki, swarmed with inchoate figures and dynamic forms that incited viewers to search for sense in the face of inherent natural disorder. Banisadr’s works were displayed together with Ming- and Qing-dynasty ceramics, from the Benaki Museum’s collection, that are adorned with decorative motifs in the vibrant blue pigment derived from cobalt oxide, obtained from Persia by Chinese artisans who exported their wares to markets in the Middle East and Europe. Called ultramarinus by Venetian traders, the precious blue hue became a conduit for cultural exchange and transformation, a passage reflecting the artist’s own emigration from Iran to the United States as a young child in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com A Ming-dynasty incense burner placed in the center of the room bore a resonant line from twelfth-century Persian apothecary and poet Attar of Nishapur: “He who approaches the seller of perfumes / himself acquires part of the sweet fragrance given forth by those scents.” Banisadr’s imagery is mutable, the shapes materializing, shifting, and dissolving under the gaze and the alchemy of myriad cultural references and contexts. Adjacent to a Qing-era dish adorned with two writhing azure dragons, the painting Rhizome, 2019, depicted an icy black-and-blue tempest with monsters or rodents, shark fins or angel wings, and a feminine wraith engulfed in expressionistic chaos. The palette echoes Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave, ca. 1830–32, while the cacophonous composition recalls Picasso’s terrifying representation of war in Guernica, 1937, as well as sixteenth-century battle scenes by Persian miniaturist Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād—pictures that similarly burst beyond the frame and explode perspective to compress narrative and negate order. Land of Black Gold, 2008, has a backdrop of blue squares suggesting a chessboard underlying the mayhem of a carnivalesque scene wrought in strokes and daubs of incandescent color. Medieval peasants and masked troubadours coexist with myriad mythical creatures among a tumble of architectural structures; front and center is a pair of disembodied legs straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. The eyes find no rest in vertiginous fields of jumbled planes that convey the essence of the present as a raucous polyphony of disembodied events. The scene brings to mind the moral of Pieter Bruegel the Younger’s painting The Alchemist, ca. 1600, after an engraving by his father, illustrating the folly of greed. Nothing has been learned since the loss of paradise: Oil is the new gold, the motive for so much spilling of blood and destroying of homes. Despite all the glimpses of art history, Banisadr’s work is decidedly rooted in the here and now. In The Rise of the Blond, 2016, a motley mob of brash beasts marches stridently off to the right in a celebratory pageant. The apparent leader sports a distinctive yellow mane, a robe of royal purple, and the beaked visage of a Venetian plague-cum- carnival mask. Painted just before Donald Trump’s election, it was a prescient allegory for things to come. After a year of protests and riots amid a mismanaged pandemic, SOS, 2020, seems to be the aftermath—as much an uncanny premonition as a depiction of a hell of the sort envisioned by artists for centuries. Its denizens are rendered as animals confined in a corral while an angelic figure holding a scroll, presumably Saint Peter, looks down on the fiery carnage. Mimicking the murky mechanics by which memories become blurred, buried, or distorted in the depths of the unconscious to emerge transfigured, these paintings offer singular visions of collective calamity. The restless experience of looking at them mirrors the intuitive way Banisadr improvises them over time, employing erasure and returning repeatedly to nurture the spontaneous emergence of elements. As Attar sums up the lesson of his poem “The Language of the Birds,” also the title of a 2018 painting by the artist: “Do you see? / The shadow and its maker are one and the same.” Next to these vivid paintings reality seems like the shadow state. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Finding Hope in the Chaos: Ali Banisadr Interviewed by Osman Can Yerebakan Paintings that blend and blur the world together. OSMAN CAN YEREBAKAN JANUARY 28, 2021 Ali Banisadr, The Caravan, 2020, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York. 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com When Brooklyn-based painter Ali Banisadr visited the Benaki Museum in Greece last year, he came across a blue- and-white Ming Dynasty–era vase in its collection. Much to the Iranian-born artist’s surprise, a closer inspection revealed that his favorite poem by Persian poet Attar of Nishapur was inscribed on its surface. Besides being the artist’s Instagram handle, Simorgh is the protagonist in Attar’s circa 1177 poem, The Conference of the Birds, about thirty birds in search of the legendary namesake bird “with all the answers.” When the flock reaches where they believe Simorgh resides, the poem climaxes with an epiphany: they, in fact, together make up the bird of the birds. “I’ve always loved the metaphor of thirty birds going on a journey together to learn that they are the very answer they were in search of,” says Banisadr. Banisadr’s paintings are oftentimes large-scale panoramas of life—of yesterday, today, and the future. They look hauntingly erratic, yet they contain warm hues as soothers. There is exile, excess, greed, hunger along with pockets of hope, color, and jubilance. Figures blend into their surroundings, and environments create masses; his tones are bold, and occasionally splashy, with skies and lands coalescing through his arm- or wrist-length brushstrokes. Chaos prevails, but hope echoes overall. As someone who fled the Iranian Revolution at an early age, Banisadr is no stranger to tumult; however, he, too, admits that this past year prompted him to make discoveries over the canvas. —Osman Can Yerebakan Osman Can Yerebakan Let’s start with the Ming Dynasty–era vase. What was so intriguing about this discovery for you as a painter? Ali Banisadr The Attar poem has always been a part of me: I made a painting in 2018 titled Language of the Birds, which was also blue and white. When I talked to the Benaki Museum director, he said the vase was in cobalt blue which China at the time imported from the region of Iran and Iraq. I am intrigued by this intertwined journey between Europe where they commissioned these vases, China where they made them, and the Middle East where they sourced the paint. Moreover, they were heavily collected by the Dutch and Iranians, and, now, they’re exhibited in Greece. I could see this as an alternative Silk Road running through geographies, from Asia toward Europe through the Middle East. From there, I see a link to my paintings which, in my opinion, slip out of visual, geographical, and historical categorizations, especially in the world today where we live somewhere between the digital and the analog. The exhibition in Greece is titled Ultramarinus, and in Latin ultra is beyond and marine is blue, which can also mean sea. Back then in Europe, they had to go beyond the Mediterranean to source this blue color, so it was a highly regarded, sparse dye that was typically used for depictions of the Virgin Mary. Also keep in mind that the show opened on November 3, and the first painting greeting visitors is called Hypocrisy of Democracy (2012). 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Ali Banisadr, Only Breath, 2020, oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery, New York. OCY What does it mean to make paintings today when we are stuck between URL and IRL? AB I ask this to myself all the time, and painting saves me! I’m able to tap into a place above thinking, a place of intelligence that can only be accessed through painting. I haven’t witnessed this other type of consciousness conveyed by any other medium in such a spiritual way. There’s a mystical aspect to painting in which it creates a portal to a place smarter than what I could possibly reach. Every time I tried other mediums, I felt limited—they didn’t mesh with my nature. Painting takes me back to an ancient way of thinking when people understood what they imagined through painting. It was basically magic that drove them to paint. They didn’t do it to show in an 509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com exhibition or to sell. When I look at paintings from five hundred years ago from Northern Europe, I am able to communicate, and that is pretty powerful. The only other experience where I can see this possibility is in poetry.