Ali Banisadr

Born :

1976

Say someone tells me their name - that name can turn into a taste or a color and that's how I categorize it in my mind. It's an easy way of categorizing things.

color names mind

I sometimes say the conflict in the work is the conflict of my own thoughts and anxieties. It's a civil war in my head. The top part [of my artwork] is you letting go and floating. You become part of the air and you've tapped into the heartbeat of the universe. I guess that's what people do when they meditate.

letting-go heart war

I never think about actual things when I'm painting. I'm not thinking, "I'm going to put a person here, a tree here and a bird there." The beginning stage is always the sound. From that, slowly, stories come about based on what I'm reading or thinking at the time, but if I didn't have that sound I don't know what I would do.

reading bird thinking

When I am working on a painting, everything that I am thinking about at the time - be it current events, the books I am reading, personal events, influences, emotions, etc. - all find their way into my work.

reading book thinking

People quickly look through things and don't sit and experience. That's a problem with artwork, [because] it's more of an experience than something to quickly look at. It takes a while for everything to unveil itself.

problem people looks

Think about the way you go surfing on the Internet - you go from one thing to another. You can't really concentrate. I can't sit and read 10 pages on my computer. You'll read and then all of a sudden part of your brain is like, "What about that? ...You're not reading the whole book. You're reading fragments. Even though I think it's bad, I think it's interesting too, because that's the way my brain works.

reading book thinking

Sometimes I forget what I put in. I want to capture things in that way, where you're looking into your memory, a dream or hallucination. The characters become a mixture of archetypes, [and] that's what I like. You're trying to figure it out and your brain wants to categorize things, but it can't because of this motion. You want to solve the problem, but it never gets solved. It's like when you read a really good book and the story never leaves you.

dream i-like-you memories

I like to zoom out of the situation so I can see it all and don't get caught up in the little things down there.

zoom little-things littles

My work makes people understand things in a visual way that I could never understand in a literal way - like the way you deal with and break down problems, and don't come up with answers, but [find] a pathway that becomes clearer.

answers people way

When I was taking art history I was always angry that we would skip certain chapters because "it wasn't important." Like, "Let's skip over the Japanese. Let's just get to Giotto, because that's where everything begins." It's like, no. Everything is relevant to me.

giotto important art

As I work day after day, inspirations from different places go into the work. It's combination, but it's also comparative. I'll be reading two books at the same time that are totally different [and] then have two stories mix together.

inspiration reading book

Painting is a slow process; it takes time to get there, you learn little by little and always want the next painting to be better than the last. For me, success is about this, seeing the slow progress in my work.

progress want littles

Painting is a way of thinking visually, so whatever is happening with me at the time gets reflected in the work.

painting way thinking

"Motherboard," for me, has four different levels: the bottom part is the water, vegetation, and growth. The second part is the world with figures and animals; there's chaos and civilization. The third part is the digital zone - these red things are turning into really loud digital sounds. Then the fourth level is like ether and things turning into air. This idea of how we're becoming partly digitalized is really interesting to me.

air animal civilization