The Fortune Teller
Online Exhibition (CLICK HERE)
Perrotin is pleased to announce The Fortune Teller, the first solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Ali Banisadr with the gallery at its Shanghai space.
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.
Banisadr’s characters are related to the extraterrestrial beings encountered in science fiction, heroes and wizards in epic quest novels, medieval bestiaries, the ghoulish creatures that Matthias Grünewald depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), and illustrated alchemical texts, just to name some of his inspirations. However, while resolution is common to many of these works, Banisadr’s figures inhabit a turbulent, alternate world in which resolution and redemption are noticeably absent.In the 11 paintings that constitute Banisadr’s debut exhibition in China, the viewer is invited to enter cacophonous worlds and shadowy domains. Most of the paintings can be divided into two groups, with The Painting (2020 - 2024) being the exception. Each group tends to be the same size, with the smaller paintings sharing the same moody blue palette. Within each group, however thematically connected, each painting is as unique as the planets in our solar system.
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 Fortune Teller (2024), Banisadr uses geometry, a new compositional device for him, to divide the painting into discrete areas. There are two different-sized, overlapping pyramids rising from the bottom edge. The apex of a small yellow one touches the middle of the painting’s top edge. Painted a color found nowhere else in the painting, it becomes a mysterious sign, whose meaning we cannot decipher. Is it a sign of hope, a message, or a structure seen in the distance? On either side of the yellow pyramid, linear elements descend from the top edge, dividing the sky into separate zones. Located in the upper right-hand corner, the blue and white streaked, irregular rectangle works in counterpoint to the hubbub taking place in the rest of the painting. Everything in The Fortune Teller seems to be rising up in defiance of gravity.
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.
The four small-scale paintings collectively titled and numbered The Subterranean Realms brings us to a shadowy, enclosed world. Is this where we dream? Can we always tell where a dream ends and reality begins? By provoking viewers to ask questions, such as these, Banisadr pulls us deeper into his work. After a while, we become lost in the looking, at times unsure of what we are examining, especially in this group of paintings. That unsureness infuses these works with an emotional edge and a sense of foreboding, akin to how we feel when we wake up from a mysterious dream full of indecipherable signs. By inviting us to ponder his paintings and all the many associations they evoke, from catastrophic natural events to miraculous occurrences, Banisadr directs us back to the world we inhabit, full of inexplicable mysteries.
Text by John Yau
