Artist Ali Banisadr keeps an organized studio in a two-level Brooklyn condominium, where the area dedicated to painting has a front-burner/back-burner setup. The front-burner end, outfitted with a supply-laden cart and a custom pegboard wall, is for the work in progress. During a visit to the studio late last year, a sizable blank canvas hung there. Banisadr—who concentrates on only one painting at a time, discovering each piece along the way—indicated that it could stay that way for a week or longer, while he waited for the right mood, color or idea to occur.

"My speed is my speed," he says, shrugging. "I can't do anything about it."

Hanging in the back-burner end of the room were two smaller canvases, one of which he judged to be 90 percent done, the other maybe 40 percent. Banisadr often works on a grand scale, painting bustling, usually vivid assortments of odd and amorphous beings that emerge from, congregate within and resolve back into abstracted, churning compositions that can sprawl across one, two or three large panels. His works are deliberate mysteries. Their scattered details—a bird's beak, a patterned robe, a row of teeth—add up to no easy narrative, and their titles tend toward the gnomic: The Myth Makers, Trust in the Future, It's in the Air. On June 18, as part of Art Basel Online, this year's virtual edition of the preeminent annual art fair, Banisadr premiered his latest work, Red. (On Saturday, June 20, at 11:00am EST, he will discuss the painting with Patricia Hickson, a curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, in a free and public event on Zoom.)

The paintings in his studio that day were comparatively muted and less expansive, zeroed in on a select few of his monstrous subjects. But even with this tighter focus they were inscrutable—not wholly human, not wholly animal, not even wholly there. "I want my paintings to have that feeling of metamorphosis, where you're looking at things becoming something else," he says. "Because that's the truest mirror of imagination and memory and dreams—things are always changing."

Ever since his first solo show, in 2008, Banisadr's creative heritage has been attributed to an array of predecessors spanning eras and styles, and their diversity speaks to the singularity of his vision. In his art, observers have claimed traces of Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings, the details of Persian miniatures, the vibrant abstractions of Wassily Kandinsky and, above all, the clamorous, zoomed-out panoramas of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel.

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