For Banisadr, a synesthetic painter, the visual motion he renders on his canvas directly correlates to sound and vibration. Growing up in Iran during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the artist experienced air raids and bombings going off around him, whereupon he would run down to the basement and draw. Many years later, as a grad student in his thirties, Banisadr visited the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy, where he experienced a flashback: the artist remembered the crater where his school once stood, as well as the half-leveled buildings of his childhood. Soon after, he began making charcoal drawings based on the sound of explosions. Banisadr eventually moved on to experimenting with color and paint, but he said he continues to use sound as a “guiding force.”

With his imagination inextricably linked to concepts such as “energy” or “harmony”—terms he mentioned as essential to his process—an intangibility permeates his work. The seven ink drawings of the “Seven” series (2017) look like rough portraits or smudged photographs. Without clearly defined features, the faces lose all trace of personal identity, and the artist’s subjects are deprived of their humanity. Instead, we are left with generic bogeymen that are easy stand-ins for criminals, terrorists or enemies of the state. “From this imagined order, we fear them,” Banisadr said, alluding to how those in power exploit our lack of empathy or understanding.

The meaning behind the painting The Rise of the Blond (2016) was uncloaked once I recognized the yellow mane of a figure in purple looming above an anthropomorphized horde that shuffles to the right in an orderly fashion. Banisadr revealed that he painted the work during and in the immediate aftermath of last year’s US presidential election. His internalization of current events also inspired a tumultuous canvas, Mosaic People (2017), in which an obscured, faceless crowd clothed in brightly colored textiles scrambles in many directions. Smears of paint, like shrapnel, explode from the background, contributing to the overall feeling of chaos and confusion. Here, Banisadr paints people who are “being pushed out of their land.” Again, the viewer’s eyes must wander, our gaze trying to keep up with the setting’s intended movement.