Noble/Savage
Olney Gleason
October 30–December 20, 2025
New York

Ali Banisadr: Noble/Savage inaugurates the new Olney Gleason gallery—the cavernous, concrete-coffered space of the late Paul Kasmin, renamed after Kasmin’s former president, Nick Olney, and his senior director, Eric Gleason. Banisadr’s paintings and luscious pastels line its walls, scaled up to monumental size, while bronze sculptures stand sentinel at center. Banisadr’s practice is figure-based, as he once wrote in a notebook: “My work is not abstract / You just can’t see it.”1 Indeed. Banisadr’s combinatorial practice of symbolic appropriation and synthesis revels in a personal iconography of diminutive hybrid figures and ideograms that appear amid distinct units of colliding multidirectional brushstrokes. These polyrhythmic, laterally expanding compositions seem to dance in ecstatic syncopation, their visceral excitations further heightened through astute cropping, forcing Banisadr’s cacophony of aleatory asynchronicity beyond its frame.

An obsessive researcher, Banisadr immerses himself in themes and images that reach back centuries and span a variety of cultural formations. He extracts compositional armatures from the Western canon, lifts images from ancient ritualistic cults, and reinscribes Jungian archetypes to propose painted allegories and sculptural avatars that become mises en abyme of visual stimuli. Dense with pictorial incident, Banisadr’s paintings evince a kind of horror vacui, a compulsive filling-in that might well relate to early sensory trauma: he was a child during the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, when “holes” were everywhere—in the aftereffects of bombings, in buildings gone missing, in emptiness where earth and grass had provided areas for play, and in unanswered questions as to the reasons for such annihilating violence. How to make sense of the fragments and absences, those irreparable negations? Banisadr would seek answers by seeing, learning, listening, and reading to feed a voracious appetite to know, to fill full, to repair. Whether by constructing genealogies or making art, he has said, “It’s me trying to desperately figure stuff out.”

And yet, in viewing these pictures, searching for Banisadr’s sources felt like an optical scanning exercise à la “Where’s Waldo?” The activity might hold viewers’ (and researchers’ and critics’) attention, but the exercise bypasses the heart of the works’ appeal. As I repeatedly orientated and reoriented myself to his picture planes and watched others do the same, it occurred to me that these paintings catalyzed a kind of somatic sympathy, a correlating vibration between the viewing audience and the pictorial events they witnessed, as if Banisadr had removed the fourth wall. He freely admits to the metaphor of a proscenium, describing his recent works as “like stages, like a theatrical stage or something.”

In Leviathan (2025), titled after the sea serpent engaged in cosmic battle between chaos and order, Banisadr organizes roiling horizontal ribbons of brushwork amid broad facets joined at their fault lines to create a careening dynamism. Fitted edge to edge, these abstract puzzle pieces effect a dystopian chaos, providing a backdrop before which hybrid grotesques emerge, masked, animalistic, their mouths distorted and teeth bared like one of Francis Bacon’s screams. Left of center, a bloated figure holds a papal ferula, as if to confer the urbi et orbi blessing. Here, however, all is reversed: holding his ferula, unusually, in his right hand, the “pope” raises his gloved left hand in a gesture of obverse benediction; he is robed in red, which in papal symbology signifies the blood of martyrs; and his face is disfigured by a pronged, scarablike mask suggesting a rhinoceros beetle. At lower right, a bearded and berobed man sits before an eternal flame, while lurking nearby is a monstrous catlike creature, eyes blazing and teeth bared. At bottom center, a helmeted figure dips what appears to be glistening linked chains (a symbolic representation of “the chain of being,” perhaps one of the many “world-building” patterns of interest to Banisadr) into the sea, while a long-necked lute rests on the arm of a seated figure above. The central action, of course, is the serpentine brushed line that wends its way through these discordant and discontinuous pictorial events.

Banisadr also understands how the experience of a composition, whether musical or visual, is guided by tonality. Like the harmony that grants resolution at the final arrival of the tonic chord, Banisadr’s underlying tonal palette resolves competing pictorial incidents in blues and violets. In Leviathan, sudden bursts of complementary yellows and greens are moments of articulation in the general scheme of surging rhythms. Dramatic, too, is the shift from tumult below to openness in the upper register, where the apex of snow-covered mountains forms a pedestal for the setting sun. A choir of supplicants rise in a single gesture, their torsos distended like saved souls. Opposite them, a ghostly royal processional seems like a nod to James Ensor’s carnivalesque Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888).