'As contemporary artists, we live in a storm of images. The speed, saturation, and manipulation of visual culture today functions as a kind of social control—our senses constantly bombarded, our capacity for quiet perception eroded. As a painter, I feel this pressure daily. My studio becomes both a shelter and a decoding space, a place where I can try to make sense of the onslaught. I often think of Poussin in this context—he, too, lived through a time of dramatic change and used painting as a means to respond, to contain, to think.
For me, painting remains a way to move through the storm—to turn visual chaos into sense, or at least into a space where contemplation is possible. Like Poussin, I aim not to deny the turbulence of the world, but to face it with deliberate vision. His work reminds me that composition is not just about beauty—it is an ethics of seeing. It’s a way of asserting that thought, form, and feeling still matter.'
Image: Ali Banisadr, The Flood, 202528 x 36 in
