Ali Banisadr talks to Elephant

Sound is not something people tend to connect with painting. The countless museum canvases that celebrate modern and contemporary icons are, for the majority, silent symbols of their artist’s original actions. Yet Tehran-born, New York-based artist Ali Banisadr explains his works as coming from vibrations that are embedded in his mind. Less violent than the tremors that tormented his adolescence, the noises that come to him now are more consoling, symphonic even. His paintings—currently showing at Het Noordbrabants Museum, in Hertogenbosch, Holland—are, as he explains them, born of the animated insides of his mind, that seem ready to riot.

Can you explain the nature of this show? Given the choice of works, are we looking at a retrospective here in Holland?

This exhibition is my first museum retrospective in Europe. It brings together a decade’s worth of paintings and drawings from 2008 until now. It’s been great for me to have this chance to reunite with some of the older paintings that I haven’t seen since they left the studio. The catalogue that accompanies the show includes an essay by the art historian Robert Hobbs.