An Unspeakable Act- An Interview with New York based artist Ali Banisadr
at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris

Rajesh Punj

Painted whilst upright Ali Banisadr’s canvases appear as these aesthetic avalanches of accident and incident, in which the irrevocable imagery of fragmented figures contoured into these action spaces, are the tormented dreams of the artist’s inscrutable imagination. Works in which a whole cannon of colours are whipped up into a frenzy, in order to provoke his characters to come to the fore. And as Banisadr has mentioned previously of his works, of arriving ‘in the middle of the action’, and of the work ‘slowly unfolding itself and unveiling its content to you’. As though a series of theatrical crescendos captured in the blink of an eye.

Individually Banisadr’s works demand a level of attention that much of visual reality is less deserving of; as works like We Haven’t Landed on Earth Yet 2012, History 2012, and more recently Foreign Lands 2015 recall something of the foreboding spirit of Hieronymus Bosch’s painted prophecies, with the advanced brushstrokes of American Willem de Kooning. Identifying as they did, that there is an exhaustive alchemy to applying colours to a canvas in order to create a scene that is as deserving of our attention as the edgy melodrama of our lives. It is as if in works like Age 2015 Banisadr is merely the messenger for an unspeakable act that as the painter he characteristically comes to code and decode in order everything returns to a more amenable silence.