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Sunday 16 February

Davood Roostaei: The Dirty Hands of Truth

Published on: 1 January 2025

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 4 minutes

In his radical quest for artistic truth, Iranian-American artist Davood Roostaei created Cryptorealism, a technique where his fingers replace brushes to weave layers of reality that challenge our conventional perception of contemporary art.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Davood Roostaei (1959-2023) was not just an Iranian painter exiled in Los Angeles. He was a genius who reinvented painting with his fingers when brushes were no longer sufficient to express the complexity of our fractured world. While some were marveling at monochrome canvases sold for millions, he was creating a new pictorial language: Cryptorealism.

Imprisoned for two years by the Iranian regime for daring to make subversive graffiti, Roostaei emerged from his cell with a radical vision: to paint reality by concealing it. As Walter Benjamin theorized in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, the authenticity of a work lies in its “hic et nunc”, its here and now. Roostaei understood this better than anyone—each of his canvases is a living testimony that reveals itself only to those who take the time to look beyond appearances.

His technique is unique: no brushes, just his fingers to create successive layers of images and meaning. It’s as if Pollock and Bacon had a child raised by Deleuze and Guattari. The multiplicity of planes, the superposition of realities, all echo the “rhizome” concept developed by these French philosophers. There is no beginning or end in his works, just infinite connections between hidden images.

In 1986, he definitively abandoned the brush. It was a radical act, like when Duchamp abandoned painting for his “Large Glass”. But where Duchamp sought to kill art, Roostaei sought to resurrect it through direct contact with the material. His fingers became extensions of his mind, as in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, where the body is the vehicle of being-in-the-world.

The Cryptorealism he invented is not just a style; it’s a visual philosophy. As Hanns Theodor Flemming wrote, it is “a form of enigmatic art with realistic motifs drawn from a wide range of themes, from antiquity to the present and the future”. In other words, it’s an organized chaos that makes sense when one takes the time to decrypt it.

Take “Glasnost” (1988), painted three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. At its center, Christ is crucified on the Kremlin’s spires. On Red Square, empty, a solitary tank with its red star. In the upper-left corner, a bloodied dove. It’s more than a painting; it’s a visual prophecy anticipating the end of communism. Roostaei does what Theodor Adorno thought impossible after Auschwitz: poetry with the horror of history.

His German period (1984-2000) was marked by the influence of “die neue Wilde”, the wild neo-expressionism shaking Germany. But Roostaei went further. He didn’t just paint emotion; he concealed it under layers of reality like a reverse archaeologist burying treasures for future generations.

Los Angeles marked a turning point. The Californian light transformed his palette. The colors exploded as if Matisse had taken LSD. His works became more complex, denser. The images overlapped like in a David Lynch film where reality and dream merge. It’s Jacques Rancière in painting: the “distribution of the sensible” becomes literal, each viewer creating their own narrative based on what they perceive.

His process is fascinating: first, he anchors realistic scenes on the canvas with his fingers, then obscures them with Pollock-like splashes of paint. It’s as if Nietzsche were right: truth can only be grasped behind veils. The more one looks, the more one discovers. It’s the opposite of Instagram art: no instant gratification here, but a progressive revelation demanding time and engagement.

His final works, such as “Turnings” (2023), show an absolute mastery of this technique. The gestures are more confident, the colors bolder. It’s as if, at the end of his life, he had achieved what Heidegger called the “truth of being”: total authenticity in artistic expression.

Roostaei reminds us that true art takes time—time to create, time to view, time to understand. As Roland Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida, there is the studium (general interest in an image) and the punctum (the detail that pierces us). In Roostaei’s works, the punctum is everywhere and nowhere at once, hidden beneath layers of paint waiting to be discovered.

His last major project, “Imagine – 2022”, a monumental canvas measuring 2.4 x 3.7 meters and valued at one million euros, was intended to raise funds for Ukraine. Even at the end, he used his art as a weapon against injustice, just as he did when painting on the walls of Tehran. Some might call it naïve to believe that art can change the world. But as Theodor Adorno said, in a false world, truth can only exist in the extremes. And Roostaei was a master of extremes.

He died too soon, at 63, leaving us a visual legacy that will continue to unfold long after his passing. Like medieval manuscripts hiding pagan texts beneath Christian prayers, his canvases are modern testimonies telling the story of our time to those who know how to read them.

Roostaei reminds us that painting can still be revolutionary. It takes the courage to plunge one’s hands into the material and create something new, even if it means spending two years in prison for it.

Reference(s)

Davood ROOSTAEI (1959-2023)
First name: Davood
Last name: ROOSTAEI
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • Iran (Islamic Republic of)

Age: 64 years old (2023)

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