Looking at Banisadr’s work, I kept getting the feeling that I was in the presence of an unnamed and even unnamable visual storm. I mean this literally and metaphorically. This is true whether he was working small, as in Only Breath (oil on linen, 20 x 16 inches, 2020) or large, as in Red (oil on linen, 48 by 60 inches, 2020), which is divided equally between its upper and lower halves. The weightier, darker, bottom half is occupied by spectral figures, while the upper area functions as the backdrop: in this case, a reddish, atmospheric glow. The different horizontal lines and bands spanning the middle of the painting, behind the figural presences and below the sky, pushes the forms closer to the painting’s surface. As a result, the compressed spatiality of its compositional format can be understood as a stage set or as a landscape that never quite reaches the horizon, which implies a world somewhere beyond this one.

...

In Only Breath, the smaller painting I cited earlier, Banisadr locates five curving, pink digits of a hand-like form in the center of the painting’s largely purple, vertical rectangle. Once we see the hand, which is an isolated cluster of bending pinkish bands amidst a sea of purple forms and red and white marks, as well as recognize that it too is a series of abstract brushstrokes, we know that the territory we have entered sits squarely between abstraction and figuration. Not falling on either side of this divide is difficult, but Banisadr always does it deftly. The five digits invite the viewer to hypothesize about what is surrounding them. Speculation is not the kind of seeing we associate with art, which has become a sophisticated distraction in recent years.

Is Banisadr’s figure wearing a loose mask or is it part human and part bird, a relative of Max Ernst’s Loplop, which was an alter ego for the artist? What about the white-spotted figural shapes behind this figure, in the upper part of the painting? Why do I feel that there is something clerical or inquisitorial about these figural presences, even though I have no idea what they believe in or stand for? How are we meant to read the painting’s title?

Red and Only Breath transport us to a world whose inherent natural laws remain opaque and distinct from each other. This is what I find both appealing and unsettling about Banisadr’s paintings. I am fascinated by what I see, but I don’t understand it. It is a kind of looking that I associate with early childhood, that state before we are able to name what is around us.


John Yau in the forthcoming Rizzoli monograph, 2020



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The title comes from the poem Only Breath, by the 13th century Persian poet Rumi:

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion
or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up
from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any
origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.
I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,
first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.