Shahrooz Sadr is a visual artist who basically uses the virtual space as the main venue to display his images. In the fantastic, imaginary world of these images, men and animals appear in vague, eccentric bonds. Historic genres such as landscape, portraiture, still life, and flower painting find a new narrative through humor and absurd. Various visual devices, including multiple angles, combination and distortion, foreshortening and exaggeration have been practiced in these drawings. Studies on the figure and portrait, mythological combinations of humans and animals, absurd rituals casting beheaded and mutilated people, the most bizarre flowers and insects, and deserts and seascapes turn into fantastical arenas, each of which can trigger vague narrations in the viewer’s mind.

In another turn, however, he brings these images -which are bound to the virtual world, being seen through mobile phones by thousands of people- onto large-scale canvases and paints them in a most traditional manner. In these heroically scaled oil paintings, the elements of the drawings appear in a different way, and the wit is replaced with awe. The combative, iconoclast approach of the artist finds a radical expression in the historical format of large-scale painting and brings about a rare experience for the viewer. “Echium Vulgare”, having victoriously battled the human-headed lions, armed goblins, and knotted snakes to get “painted”, dominates the viewers with its huge scale and overwhelms them in its flat, colourful world.

Helia Darabi