Katonah, New York – in disaster and in commotion – that’s where I start when I visit Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist In the Katonah Museum. The show includes paintings that are almost 7 by 10 feet and much smaller, such as “Black” (2007), which, on 28 by 24 inches, still succeeds in ficking me up. It consists of cutting brown brushes of brown, reddish brown and darker brown, with abrupt raids of white and sniffing sweeping blue gray against a background that subtly changes from black at the top to a smoky wheat at the bottom. If I look at it for a long time, I see the skeleton of a building that is hit by a force that tears its primary beams and struts; We see the moment before the total collapse, when it throws a turmoil of bodies, wood, paint and wreckage in the mouse down.
A famous actress, who described her divorce, said it was as if you took all the precious things in her life and threw them up in the air. The story of Ali Banisadr includes his birth in Tehran, his maturity during the revolution in Iran-Iraq (1980–88), and the subsequent flight of his family from Iran at the age of 12 years. The conventional art -historical tactic would be to be killed in his biography, to bring in his biography, to bring in his biography, to bring in his biography, to pose that the viewer of the struggle and the fashion of the armed and fashion of the armed and fashion of the armed and fashion are. We may be able to catch a glimpse of brutality and confusion, loss and relegation. Perhaps the experience of Banisadr felt like the moment in the painting: the beloved aspects of his family and culture threw Willy-Nilly into heaven to fall into the earth in pieces. I grew up in a chaotic house and recognize the signs of disorder and hatred and fear its aimlessness. But the imagination of artists are not so prose documentary. Banisadr makes images that are ruthless in their toiling movement, so this is not a cause, not Demiurge. Instead, he paints as if Bedlam is elementary, fundamentally for the world.
Part of the work is reminiscent of the swirl and swirl of simultaneity in the paintings of Julie Mehretu, but Banisadr has much more variation in style, and usually flirting with full abstraction instead of diving into it – especially when he simplifies his compositions. I also look at a glimpse of something like the hide and seek of the work of Cecily Brown, although his work is not so mandatory for a certain technique.
Take “The Serpent and the Key” (2019). Three or four, maybe five, figures are blurred as if a camera whose shutter speed is too slow is capturing their movement. The palette is mainly pale to dark blue, with highlights of lavender, green and gold. A background figure with a sphere in front of a head seems to hold an old, wooden key. Another figure, red face, what a FEZ can be, bends to charm a rolled up snake, flickers his tongue forward, while a being falls above it, his intention is unknown. There is a major hazy for the whole, the horizontal brush strokes more muted than those in “black”, but just as kinetic, just as urgent, as if Gale Winds made their house in this place. He performs a similar set of movements in “Queen of the Night” (2022) on a much larger scale, with foreground figures that sea anemones have tied or have extensively knotted ribbons for heads, and a crowd of spirits or angels or restless spirits above them.
In the larger pieces, Banisadr makes the scenes more emotional and fascinating, in some respects that are reminiscent of the narrative paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. But unlike Bosch, Banisadr is not illustrative. “These excerpts that I have shaved against my ruins” (2023), which measure 86 with 180 inches, is perhaps my favorite in the show. There is such a ruition of action that flows to me that I cannot say whether the shapes are actual figures. But occasionally I can distinguish a head, sometimes with a crown, with an eye or two visible, and something like a body underneath. The palette is so varied that I cannot say that one hue is dominant. They compete with each other for attention and for space. Close to the center is a series of pink tires that expand as they go to the foreground, as if they represent a portal, and the residents of another empire had understood their way to make our own problems. It does not offer an orderly entrance or exit; This is reminiscent of life, despite our efforts to make it mannered and civilized.
For those who want to see the life of the artist figuratively, “The Waste Land” (2006) can be illustrative of his war experience of war. A figure with hood runs in a desert -like landscape with one central, massive explosion. Dish in red and black, it compliments another detonation in the neighborhood that usually spreads brown and white material. In the foreground, a zinc hole opens with the lonely traveler and pour in the earth and everything that can glide with it. Why is this destruction so beautiful? Maybe because as external witnesses we don’t have to imagine that we are doing the reconstruction.
Recently I have been convinced that one of the important ways to analyze painting is to understand what a work – or the figures or structures inside – seem to fight for or against. What is deeply fascinating about the paintings in it The alchemist Is that they contain characters that both do at the same time: they fight against the centrifugal power of a world that, perhaps just like ours, runs with more than 1,000 miles per hour, and they struggle for their own motion, for agency in a empire that would be to leave them behind.
Ali Banisadr: The Alchemist Continue in the Katonah Museum of Art (134 Jay Street, Katonah, New York) up to and including 29 June. The exhibition was compiled by Michelle Yun Mapplethorpe, director and main curator of the museum.
