A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skilled Sailor: The Struggles of The Internationally Renowned Contemporary Artist, Davood Roostaei
German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, said it eloquently: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Davood Roostaei, an Iranian — American painter and the founder of Cryptorealism, is the living example of this quote, who gained the power to express himself in arts from the unfortunate events that befell in his life.
Roostaei works in both oils and acrylics, and while most of his body of work is made up of paintings, he also sculpts and creates drawings. Cryptorealism is his distinct style, and painting explicitly with his bare fingers is how he executes it. In this article, we decided to converse with Davood Roostaei to explore about the happenings of his life that shaped him into the maven artist he is distinguished as today.
Davood Roostaei is an epitome of a craftsman and someone who stood at a place wherein any man with a sane mind would never desire even in their wildest dreams to stand.
As a young man who was just beginning his vocation as an artist in the late 70s, Roostaei’s pursuit of passion was brutally disturbed in 1979 by the Iranian revolution. After spending years thoughtfully learning workmanship from experts in Iran, the country where he was born and raised, he was tossed behind bars for two years for art which was regarded to be rebellious by the regime. “As an artist, those two years were torturous being apart from my passion. It seemed as though my desire to emerge as a renowned artist was shattering right in front of me,” expresses Roostaei while reminiscing his agony.
However, everything that occurs under the roof of this universe happens for a legit reason. The jail could not hold back his desires and could not halt him, and in fact, it made him unstoppable in his pursuit of the arts. What he had seen and experienced caused him to understand that his artistic pathway couldn’t be the same as the standard realistic method of portraying the world. “The time I spent restricted from chasing my enthusiasm, I realized the dire need to find another approach to tell the world of what I had seen, envisioned, and experienced, coming out stronger from my adversity,” says Roostaei.
“This is how I conceived the idea of Cryptorealism,” he adds.
Soon, Cryptorealism became the prime path for the craftsman in which he had the option to both reflect his experience and narrate the reality of past, present, and future. Today, Davood Roostaei is internationally praised as a contemporary artist and the mastermind behind a progressive and revolutionary painting style called Cryptorealism.
“This novel aesthetic not only joins components of many different styles of art movements, yet rises above them; it is at the same time dynamic and illustrative, symbolic and ambiguous,” says Roostaei. The ideal approach to describe this art style is through the recognition of one of Roostaei’s unique manifestations. “From the outset sight, the composition overpowers the viewers with exuberant splashes of color and is apparently tachist and abstract; when the viewer steps back to see the painting from a distance and when they look a little more closely, they find the illustrative importance which lies hidden in a labyrinth of abstractions,” says Roostaei.
The Cryptorealistic paintings of Roostaei require carefully observing the art, to unveil hidden messages and symbols implanted within each masterwork.
With his young life in the 1970s in Iran loaded with political strife, following his detainment in 1981 for those two years forced him after his release to seek asylum in Germany. This made him re-direct his life around his passion as a craftsman in 1984, an opportunity that only a few receive in life.
In 2000 Roostaei moved to Los Angeles, where he has lived and worked for the past 20 years. This move has given his work an additional edge as it assimilates the frantic and transitional nature of North America’s third-biggest city, a city to which many come in the expectation of fulfilling their dreams. The move claimed to be the rainbow after storm in the life of Roostaei, where he embarked on the journey of fame and acclaim.
Roostaei’s work has been recognized and purchased by renowned institutions and collectors across the world including, the MOCA in Beijing, China, the Vatican collection, Händel-Haus Museum in Halle, Germany, the Élysée Palace, Hammerschmidt Villa in Bonn, Germany, Bundeskanzleramt in Berlin, Germany, Volksbank Raiffeisenbank’s art collection in Hamburg, Germany, Hamburg City Hall, Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, Israel, and the Los Angeles City Hall.
The fundamental aspect of Roostaei’s art is that he blends both the creative world as well as the political world to create a harmony in his work, the balance that only those who genuinely perceive his art can explore. The time isolated in prison stays critical to him as both an individual and an artist.
He learned how to glance inside as a true artist and outside as a person. Subsequently, he stays political right up ’til today. As Roostaei is focused on rendering pictures in ethical ways of being in the world, he donates a part of the returns of his masterful yield to different causes globally.
The life of Davood Roostaei remains an inspiration for people struggling to follow their passions that in the midst of hopelessness, the universe always works to turn odds in favor of those who are determined and head-strong to achieve anything, regardless of the obstacles.
