Ali Banisadr's Impassioned Landscapes | Brilliant Ideas Ep. 24

brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor the contemporary art world is vibrant and booming as never before it's a 21st century phenomenon a global industry in its own right brilliant ideas looks at the artists at the heart of this artists with the power to astonish challenge and surprise in this program new york-based Ally ban asada I guess a Leoben asada is probably the only artist in the world who's been influenced by the iran-iraq war graffiti art and a bizarre medical condition his paintings have been described as Willem de Kooning meets Hieronymus Bosch he produces large canvases that at first seem abstract but when you look closer a full of figures and images but then again are they figurative or abstract his style is instantly recognizable ali van assad is a painter I find that interesting because especially for a younger artist because painting of course is not considered a young man's game anymore he is able to create a multicultural painterly statement that reflects our world today and the strains of our history that make contemporary art so dynamic he's one of that generation of Iranians that were born in the 70s before the Revolution lived through the revolution as a child and then the iraq-iran war for his fine family migrated like many families from Iran to our the United States or Europe but he was interested in being a painter and an artist and came to New York and studied at the School of Visual Arts well I started making drawings when the iran-iraq war was happening I was making drawings based on the sounds that I was hearing because you know you would when the alarm would come on you would run down to the basement and then all you were left with was these sounds and vibration and I made drawings based on the sounds to try to sort of understand what was happening around me and it was I guess my way of dealing with the whole situation I think the breakthrough moment was when at graduate school I had to do my thesis and I got a grant to go to Normandy and one of the things that we did was to go to the d-day site and I was sort of looking at the scenery and it looked really familiar to me and it brought back flash of memory could sort of smell actually the the war it was so familiar that I was sort of walking around in a daze so when I came back from Normandy I decided to make these charcoal drawings that were based on sounds of explosions I felt like something happened there where I felt freed from trying to make paintings I was able to compose the work the way I've been wanting to without strategizing so much it really showed me a different way of sort of working this painting called Blackwater refers to the mercenaries sent to the Middle East operating in a strange secretive underworld and this one incubator clearly suggests a battle or explosion the childhood memories of war still seem close to the surface whether or not they're violent I think is open to question if you're looking at a scene of warfare and to that extent they might be related to the work of Hieronymus Bosch which often includes scenes of great kind of barbarity when I look at her animus box painting it still sort of speaks to what's happening in our time now it's lift through time and you look at the work and you could see those characters living now with different outfits now I'm really intrigued by the way he was able to portray society in his time but still have it lived through time and be relevant to our time gardener earthly delighted that the Prado must be my my favorite painting uh I could just go stand in front of it for hours and hours and what I love about it is that they're stories within stories within stories and you could sort of your eyes just wanders around and there's there's just so much to take in and it's an experience really it's not it's not something that you could just walk away from I mean bosch's paintings that the way it has a bird's-eye view of the world is what intrigues me seeing it from from a bird's eye point of view kind of having an overall look at macro level of society and I think in that way is that's what I try to do in my work as well sort of like pull back and look at our society from like a bird's eye perspective in 2012 one of Ali's paintings was acquired by the Islamic art departments of the Metropolitan Museum one of America's most important art collections although not yet on show alongside its historic collections from the Middle East including Persian carpets tiles and miniatures the Met now has Contemporary Art this painting is called interrogation as with many of his works its consists of vigorous brushstrokes small flakes and squiggles and it's really about the brushstroke sort of expressions of the horrific sounds actually of war there's an atmosphere of gloom that surrounds us painting of despair and I think it's a commentary also on you know what is going on today in that in our part of the world I mean the Metropolitan is the museum that I go to the most out of every other museum it's like my second home I go there at least once or twice a month so to be in this collection among all these artists that I go and look at to learn something from it's pretty pretty incredible the Persian paintings Ali particularly likes are from the Safavid period the 16th century and especially those of an artist known as behzod I mean with beciraj the faces had their own sort of personality and character where some of the Persian miniature paintings one face could be every face he kind of gave it a little bit of a twist a 16th century royal manuscript called the shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp which is perhaps the greatest Illustrated Persian mask I've ever produced and I think the battle paintings were inspirational to Ali bhai this adds word I do see myself in the tradition but I think for me what's important is to try to understand the essence of the Persian miniature paintings like its essence as opposed to trying to use them motifs and the figures and sort of make them abstract you know you see a lot of that happening so in a way I do see myself as part of the tradition of persian miniature but I'm not making Persian miniature paintings I see Ali as a Brooklyn artist which is where he lives and works and you know where I'm sure he feels at home and the extent to which he draws on references from the past and the present I'm sure connects in some way to the Islamic Republic of Iran but the extent to which he should or could be seen as an Islamic artist seems almost irrelevant I think for the enjoyment of the work yes is for Ali there's a strange alchemy between sounds and images that drives his work sound is like the underneath layer of all the work that I make really as soon as I put the brush down a sound begins like a short note or a longer note that sort of carries on I'm not sure I understand the importance of music in his paintings but I have a strong sense of sound when I look at them all even Assad has synesthesia it's a condition where different senses like sound and vision get closely allied together or even confused Ali sees or hears his paintings like compositions and it really influences the way he works synesthesia for me I think it's the acid it's nice to be able to listen to music and have this sort of parallel visual world that's going at the same time the music that Ali's listening to for this painting is ascending bird a piece by the Iranian musician que Han kal ho and string quartet Brooklyn rider another Iran meets Brooklyn combination I like how it begins very quietly and then it just sort of erupts which is I guess I could relate to that in a way the way I paint I mean the energy just shoots up and then it just sort of kind of calms down and then it goes up again Ilia talked about synesthesia and he's had it since he was a child he talks about the iran-iraq war and so that kind of splintering sound of bombs coming I think you know have made a huge psychological impact I mean and why wouldn't it I mean with music I'm not making a soundtrack painting or anything like that the sound that I'm talking about is it comes from the painting itself but it has to be exciting to me it has to be surprising to me or us it's no point it's the rhythm that is the most compelling thing in Ally's work and that rhythm is I think contemporary his painting seemed more staccato then fluid I mean in his brushwork and yet of course you know he's he seems to be like reveling in this paint so he takes it into I think a very exciting realm the ascending bird music refers to an Icarus like Iranian legend where a bird flies towards the Sun and consumes itself in a moment of Transfiguration death is a transformation you're found as like this like a sound of rising like things are it's like an opera where the sound just goes up and I think that's that's sort of what's happening at the top like as you go to the higher level it transforms into another element it becomes something else like that sending bird music or even particularly like that painting over there I mean all those figures are transforming into ether most of my paintings the bottom side were all the kind of chaos and were all the figures animals gods machines everything is and then as it lifts up the painting becomes lighter and there's some kind of a hope the chaos underneath transfers into like another element like ether or something to me they're like a jumble of notes and trying to untangle those notes and in a way to listen to that sound seems much more important to me as a viewer than to actually decode the visual imagery they're quiet they're finished when they're quiet and and there's there's they're not asking for anything more and they're fine exactly how they are and usually what I do is I turn away a painting for like a month or something and then come in one day and quickly turn it around and look at it and if it's nothing jumps out at me then it's fine if there's always you know if there's a part that jumps out at me and you have to deal with it even though it could be the best part of the painting maybe I have to destroy it for the whole thing to function really you look around and it's like looking at like little worlds there with little people going about their daily life sort of like Roybal paintings where you have this bird's-eye view and you're just creating narrative for these little figures that are going about their daily lives it's kind of fun Brooklyn is the most creative borough in New York and New York is made up of five boroughs the most well-known of course is Manhattan which is the origin of the art world past but the cost of living in the center of New York and in particular Manhattan has become prohibitive for most artists so younger artists have colonized sections of Brooklyn and Queens in order to find cheap living but also large working spaces and so the bulk of artists that even successful ones tend to be operating and working in Brooklyn when I came to New York as I walked around I felt like if I could call anywhere home this this is it I don't feel displaced here really because of diversity and because of the type of people that live here you have the best of both worlds you could go to the museums as you like very close but then you could sort of get away from everything too and come up here and sort of cleanse your palate after hours of painting I've been actually watching the sunset every evening looking at the colors and somehow these colors have worked their way into my paintings this sort of pinkish color came about from in the sunset but the mood certainly for me more so than before it reflects my surrounding workspace it's always fascinating to see how an artist adapts to his or her surroundings and how it affects the work the works were a few years ago seemed to come mainly out of his own imagination the current work though is much more rooted in the reality of his neighborhood you can see the inspiration of the rural down Gates Street characters of the Brooklyn light alley literally does walk the streets gathering inspiration and the things that catch his eye often surprising this line element this sort of motif I think I see a lot of shutters right walking around and I thought you know that's kind of an interesting element to use like it separates the space behind from what comes forward and I always like this sort of element of having deep space fight with flatness perhaps someone could rent a room there it's nice how there's like rust and gray and a lighter gray and yellow one of the things that lately I've been paying attention to is the sort of weathered look and kind of making mental notes of how I could use these in my painting yeah you have like a juxtaposition of like gritty and nature hello I love your garden you know walking around Brooklyn he filled a sense of creative energy around and you meet people that in the neighborhood he started out as a graffiti artist great groups of other graffiti artists and he found that really exhilarating you got to get this at the beginning America it was really hard for me to adjust in a school that you know getting the best grades wouldn't necessarily make you popular which in Iran it did you know that so you had to sort of adjust to a different understanding of what it is to be in America what is Brooklyn bazaar on the corner alley happens to run into pisar Royale a graffiti artist and local organizer who has a mission to bring art to the streets usually when you get a meal your face on it you're dead I'm very much alive and well so this is the freehand paint brush oh I see okay got it it's better for me to put these things up over the label since the development of Brooklyn is the demand is so high and rather than look at boarded things I rather you know the heart yeah yeah the people - - exactly if you look they're right over everything other than our yeah that's true that's that's good that they respect that you know yeah while Ali isn't involved in street art anymore it's not hard to see its traces in his work this painting is from 2008 where graffiti art seems to confront the Persian miniatures many artists make sketches in preparation for their big paintings Ali's turning that idea on its head he's making charcoal drawings some of them quite graffiti like derived from parts of his bigger oil paintings this painting is taken from a section of the painting with sunset pinks that he's just finished working on here is the section where I wanted to capture in the drawing there are little children of the painting and then they sort of grow up and find their own find their own way Ali is also a painter with exceptional technique this is like a studio in Paris in the 1920s it's not just the high ceilings and the balcony it's the way the paint's are all arrayed he's a classic oil painter he has mastered these century-old techniques but then of course he's someone who is very well aware of the world of digital imagery and film television this is one of Ali's paintings inspired by cinema it's called bran after the Japanese epic film by Kurosawa this is coração its masterpiece you know with all the soldiers running around so he kind of looks like they're filming see how he can turn that into a painting like the way they used color that they crop the way they use like you know all of that his colors are rather denatured they're not natural colors and very noisy colors or noisy shrill but they're also beautiful there's been some criticism about my color palette but I think there's always been this bias against color in Western history where they would think it's primitive or Eastern you know for me using these colors as a way of capturing like that intensity that you get after its rained and you walk around and everything is sort of like so intense I think these colors exist in nature and they exist in your imagination so why can't they be painted you brilliant ideas powered by Hyundai Motor

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 425,903

Rating: 4.8104339 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, Ali Banisadr, Tehran, Iran, Landscapes, painting, art, synesthesia

Id: j7G06ZvCtMU

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2016