Bodo Rott from outside
Bodo Rott works as a painter, draftsman, printer and -occasionally- a writer on art.
His visual artwork spans from drawing with ink, watercolour, lithography and silkscreen-printing to oilpainting.
Bodo Rott is a figurative painter. His personnel he calls nonchildrenchildren, as his youthful figures act within the realm of childhood but mix it with unseen vitality and force.
This artificial world he uses as a poetic mirror of his experiences and of his ideas about painting.
Three main bodies of painting can be grouped:
There are paintings with a black background that look like sketchy figurative scenes on blackboard.
Another series shows figures in bright colours, the image giving the look of worn off paintings.
The most recent body of work is called Hortus Convulsus (i.e. The Distorted Garden). These paintings deal with landscape in a differnet way showing it as a tapestry-like underwood wherein plants as individualised characters fight for presence. In these paintings Bodo Rott blends a paste-it-like language, the style of biological illustrations and the trompe lóeil- like illusion of cast shadows into a peculiar overall effect of immense three-dimensional plasticity, thus conveying the impression of the spectator trailing away. It is the vitally of nature that is faced here.
About his work he says:
As every artist I am looking for the clearness of solution but- in my case –merely under the applicable extent of problems.