Portrait

Dr. Peter Schütt about Davood Roostaei:

I would like to introduce to you an artist who is from another world. A world full of magic and mystical secrets. He was born in a small Persian town whose name when translated means 'Mirage.'

He is of royal decent. His ancestors once sat upon the legendary Peacock Throne and ruled Persia for more than a century. He became a master rather early on in his home country, but he did attend a very special art academy there. He spent two years in jail, and it was there in solitary confinement and the dark cell where he discovered his inner eye as the source of his artistic inspiration. After being released he managed to escape to Germany. Since then he has been working tirelessly on himself, his artistic mission, and developing his own unique style of painting, called cryptorealism. This method reconciles the major currents of contemporary art, realism and abstraction, and at the same time, spans the bridge between the Orient and the Occident, between the deeply rooted fear of images in Judaism and Islam and the passionate love of images in the West. The term cryptorealism originates from the art critic Prof. Dr. Hanns Theodor Flemming and it knows nothing of what is ostensible or superficial. It looks behind the façades of mere appearances and makes the light which does not emanate from this world become visible.

When the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the separation of the two Germanys became evident in the 1980s, the artist struggled to capture these dramatic events in world history in one complex painting. He anticipated the German reunification in a visionary painting cycle. He created large paintings which showed them both: the collapse of the old order and the birth of a new world. That is how the artist's revolutionary style of painting came into being. However political and earthly depictions were not sufficient for him. He is possibly the only internationally known artist of our times who traverses across the common border between this world and the next, between heaven and earth, between the human and divine dimension. He turns toward the great prophets of humanity: Buddha, Zarathushtra, Plato, Socrates, Noah, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed - God bless them! He places their message, which is still valid today, right down into the broken down world of today. He looks for symbols of the unity of all religions and in this manner opens the door to a new millennium, the gate to the planetary, to the cosmic age of man. The artist is on his way to world fame. His paintings have been in exhibitions all over Europe from Monte Carlo to Saint Petersburg. He has found admirers, sponsors, and friends all over, among others the actress Gina Lollobrigida, the painter Horst Janssen, the author Günter Grass, and the politicians Chiraq, Genscher and Kohl.

He is a champion of causes and has donated the proceeds of expensive paintings for the children of Chernobyl, children hurt in accidents and suffering from vascular disease, Aids assistance programs, and the hospice movement. The artist loves costumes. Once he appeared in the world of art as a matador, another time he donned the simple garments of a Sufi mystic and practiced humility and renunciation. He is a virtuoso, a great Arabian thinker, a talent of the century, but I do not mean Michelangelo. He is a master of chiaroscuro, a player of light and shadows, a magician from the Orient, but I do not mean Vincent van Gogh. He is a revolutionary, the creator of a style for an era, a juggler of styles and schools, but I do not mean Picasso. He is a deceiver, a master of the art of disguise, a mastermind of the great poseur, a bullfighter. But this person is not Salvador Dalí.

He is Davood Roostaei.