Ali Banisadr’s Mesmerizing Paintings Make Sense of Chaos

Ali Banisadr’s childhood in Tehran was marked by violence. At the start of the Iran-Iraq War, which broke out in 1980, he was only four years old. “As a child, I was trying to understand this chaos,” he told me during a recent visit to his studio in Brooklyn. “The most abstract thing to make sense of for me was living in Iran during the war.”

That sensory overload became the foundation of his visual language, informed in large part by the artist’s synesthesia. Making art, he told me, was a way to impose order on disorder—to “make sense out of the sounds,” he explained. Four decades later, Banisadr, now 49, lives in New York, where he continues to try to understand the world through his hyperactive compositions. Layers of rough, energetic brushstrokes collide with flashes of color that hum against each other, evoking a similar dissonance to what he experienced as a child. His canvases are visually overwhelming yet remain governed by some internal logic, like a piece of music.

This push-pull relationship between order and chaos lies at the center of “Noble/Savage,” Banisadr’s solo show inaugurating New York’s Olney Gleason gallery (previously known as Kasmin). The show brings together the Iranian American artist’s newest paintings and a suite of bronze sculptures, his first in this medium. This body of work extends Banisadr’s lifelong pursuit of making sense of confusing, often contradictory human experiences.

In 1988, his family relocated from Tehran to San Francisco, where he started making graffiti among a community of artists. There, he was inspired by other artists using the medium to create sociopolitical critique. For example, in our interview, Banisadr name-checked Barry McGee, who “was making commentary about things that you were seeing in San Francisco,” referring to the gentrification of the city over the years.

Over time, though, he felt pulled toward a more solitary studio practice. “I wanted to work out of my imagination; I needed to go to school to understand how to do it right,” he said. That impulse led him to New York in 2005, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Art.

When I visited Banisadr in his studio, two long tables were piled with open books. One table, he explained, is his “visual collage,” where images accumulate as he works; the other is his “research table,” covered in philosophical notes and essays. “I’m throwing a sort of net in the ocean,” he said, “trying to catch all these different things that come out.” Pages are flipped open to show everything from Francisco de Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23) to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). These selections inspired one of the largest paintings in the show, Leviathan (2025), where priest, angel, and king figures are enveloped in a tempest of purple, white, and blue brushstrokes.

Intense gestures, resembling violent storms, have typically characterized Banisadr’s paintings. Now, some of the paintings in “Noble/Savage” feature more serene, calmer scenes inspired by forested landscapes. He and his family recently purchased a place in the Hudson Valley. Last April, the artist temporarily relocated there, setting up a small studio with views of the forests. The shift changed his palette and rhythm. “You just start to understand how nature works by being a witness to it,” he explained. The forest’s shifting light and layered greens shaped six of the canvases. One of these works is Blood Meridian (2025), a layered woodland scene rendered in loose, gestural brushstrokes that evoke dappled light and atmosphere. “There’s something about getting your hands dirty, being part of nature on a daily basis,” he said. “It’s changed the way I see.”

The artwork’s title is pulled from another book. Banisadr recently read and reread Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), where a runaway kid gets involved with scalp hunters. Though set in the 1850s, the novel’s “mood of violence,” as Banisadr put it, also aligns with our “surreal, crazy news cycle.” Inspired by the newfound serenity of his upstate getaway, Banisadr began to think about the duality in life, once again attempting to find balance amid chaos.

For his exhibition at Olney Gleason, Banisadr borrowed a structural cue from McCarthy. In Blood Meridian, each chapter begins with a string of fragmentary phrases that build rhythm before the story starts; Banisadr added a subtle nod to the book by arranging his painting titles—Paradise Lost, Pandemonium of the Sun, The Parting, Omen (all 2025)—near the front desk of the gallery so they read like a single poetic line.

Banisadr carries his interest in dualities into his new bronze sculptures. Anima and Animus (both 2025) are 4-foot sentinels “guarding the whole show,” their slender, branch-like forms rising from dark bases that appear charred. These two titles come from psychologist Carl Jung’s archetypes of anima and animus, the feminine and masculine forces that together make a whole.