By PETER FRANK, January 2023

With the introduction of photography, the modern era of painting began in crisis: where does painting end and the picture begin? With the introduction of digital media, the modern era of painting ends in crisis: when does painting end? But both beginning and end are fictions: the picture was always once removed – and painting doesn’t end. Immersed for two centuries in an existential forest of images, simultaneously fleeing the real and embracing it, painting and its devotees have gone from impressions to expressions, abstractions to non-objectivities, actions to appropriations, trying to have their paint and see it, too. It is into this ongoing painterly tumult that Davood Roostaei has pegged his sails; the painter, himself tossed about on the swells of history – not just art history, but human history – has devised a method for displaying and hiding both image and meaning, a double-sided, or perhaps double-depthed, approach to presenting things and de-presenting them, exposing and at the same time obscuring the figures and objects that have fallen onto Roostaei’s canvases in response to contemporary tempests and philosophical conundra. 

Roostaei calls this pigmented hide-and-seek “Cryptorealism,” a term at once clarion and concise. “Realism” itself comprises a lot, certainly in the context of visual art; and “Crypto” signals a diffident and secretive attitude. It would also seem to claim affinity with current economic and meta-economic developments, but the artist coined the term over 30 years ago, long before the era of NFTs and blockchains, back when “crypto” straightforwardly signified the act of hiding. For that is what Roostaei has been doing for upwards of four decades – rendering his subjects in paint and then defacing those subjects with such vigor and thoroughness as to leave behind what seems skeins and networks and cascades of pure paint, devoid of reference — and, not incidentally, applied to support without brushes (Roostaei paints entirely with his fingers). But in fact, those blankets of pigment buzz palpably with the energy of the things they have swallowed. They have become what they have engulfed.