Weaving together his own narratives using the language of abstraction, Ali Banisadr's monumental canvases such as Motherboard coalesce sight and sound in carefully-constructed worlds of astonishing complexity. For the artist, painting is a means of meditating on individual and collective pasts, capturing memories that are both crystal-clear and fuzzy. Banisadr has declared that his works are grounded in “three things: the history of myself, the history of our century, and the history of art. These things aren't going to change much.”[i]
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The History of Myself
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Max Ernst, The Barbarians, 1937. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Image source: Art Resource, NY, Artwork © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris |
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Born in Tehran in 1974, Ali Banisadr witnessed both the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War and the Islamic revolution as a child before moving to America at age 12. His experiences both in the Middle East and in the United States are palpable in his work, which is deeply informed by the displacement and violence that permeated his youth. Banisadr’s oeuvre speaks to the reality of partaking in two cultures at once, both western and that of his homeland.
In grappling with this chasm of the self, his monumental paintings are multisensory experiences: they are meant to be both seen and heard, a reflection of the artist’s synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which senses are enigmatically traiggers and combined (in Banisadr's case, the ability to "see" sounds). In |
the chaotic violence of Motherboard, auditory expressions of the sounds of combat resonate and its kaleidoscopic palette is evocative of stained glass. Banisadr elucidated that “remembering the vibrations and shattering glass during the bombings led me to the idea of translating these sounds into images in my work.”[ii] |
The History of Our Century
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Though Banisadr’s work is primarily grounded in his personal history, he has also become preoccupied with the digital age in which we exist today. Pondering the roles that technology and internet algorithms have played in our everyday lives, Motherboard juxtaposes blurred digital imagery with natural land. “I was trying to find a digital zone [in Motherboard],” Banisadr explained. “It was sound that was the driving force behind the painting. For me, paint translates into sound. In Motherboard, I heard a sound like an old modem dial-up. The bottom zone became the natural world, the next zone represented civilization, the third the digital, and the last zone was the ether, everything disappearing into it.”[iii]
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[left] Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1500 (detail, center panel, bottom left). Museo del Prado, Madrid, Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
[right] Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, Photo credit: Scala / Art Reasource, NY |
The History of Art
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These histories are told through a unique iconography pulled from the history of art, and his canvases are replete with references to diverse visual languages as medievalism and Abstract Expressionism. At the bottom of Motherboard, a Hieronymus Bosch-eque scene of chaos and commotion erupts, viewed from a high vantage point present in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Moving up the canvas, the apocalyptic episode disintegrates into an expanse of vigorous brushstrokes redolent of Willem de Kooning’s gestural paintings and Gerhard Richter’s squeegee abstractions.
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Motherboard’s brilliant color and amorphous shapes simultaneously recall those of Max Ernst and a Persian miniature; in this sense, it is a portrait of not only the multiple facets of Banisadr’s identity but also of the complex, global history of art overall.
[i] Ali Banisadr, quoted in Jonathan Beer, “Conversation with the Unnamed: Ali Banisadr,” Art-Rated, January 2012.
[ii] Ali Banisadr, quoted in Media Farzin, “Profile: Clamour and Colour Ali Banisadr,” in Canvas Magazine, September 2011, p. 139.
[iii] Ali Banisadr, quoted in Lilly Wei, “Ali Banisadr: interview,” studio international, June 2, 2014, online.
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Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild [890-6], 2004. Private Collection, Artwork © Gerhard Richter 2020 (0093) |
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