Ali Banisadr has rigorously pursued a singular trajectory ever since he first began exhibiting his work in 2008. Open and sincere, his depictions are remarkable for their imaginative conjuring of a self-contained world. It is a world that Banisadr finds in the paint, like a seer who sees what others can’t. Banisadr’s divinatory process shares something with Max Ernst’s invention of surrealist techniques, such as grattage (scraping) and frottage (rubbing), which he used to depict otherworldly scenes and creatures. However, unlike Ernst, who tended to do only one thing to his scrapings of wet paint and rubbings of uneven surfaces, such as wooden floors, Banisadr meticulously teases out a wide cast of mysterious figures and hybrid creatures from the swirls, clouds, and gestures of paint that he has applied to large and small canvases. Eventually, these figures populate a world as dense and complex as an allegorical painting by Hieronymus Bosch or the weirder paintings of Piero di Cosimo. In fact, Banisadr is one of the few contemporary artists who can legitimately claim that Bosch and di Cosimo are among his progenitors.

What is the cat-like creature , who is seated at the table in the lower center of the painting Still-Life (2024) doing? Look carefully at the illuminated plant-like form on the table in front of him, and you will see that it is made of linear elements and abstract shapes such as a circle, a sign of the artist’s deft mastery. Both creatures seem oblivious to the world around them. Above them we see other creatures going about their business. Animals wander about. In the distance, we see banners, which suggest unseen armies on the move. The more the viewer discerns, the stranger and more compelling the painting becomes.

In The Mirror World (2024), descending from the upper left-hand corner, we see a face repeated in blurred streaks of paint. The repeated faces are both ethereal and physical, figurative and abstract. Is it appearing, disappearing, or both? Banisadr’s purposeful transformations of paint’s behavioral properties is one of many things the viewer discovers while scrutinizing one of his paintings. Look directly below these faces, in the lower left-hand corner, and you see another transformation taking place. The Mirror World is full of change and mirroring. We see a world resting on the brink of chaos. Beauty and terror have become intertwined.

Banisadr’s awareness of change connects him to Chinese ink painting, which captures transient moments in nature. Like the Chinese literati painters, who were expressive in their treatment of reality, he knows he does not live outside of time, and that change is inescapable. Instead of creating the illusion that time can be made to stand still, as many Western painters have long done, Banisadr embraces change in all of its many manifestations. As his painting Time Collapse (2024) makes vividly apparent, his world is constantly undergoing metamorphosis. Are the white dots we see in the painting’s upper left-hand corner falling stars or snow? What about the white dots in the upper right-hand corner, which seem to be floating in the sky, like stars? By using thick lines to evoke window frames that separate these two areas from the rest of the painting, Banisadr reminds us that nothing is impenetrable.