Bodo Rott

"Painting satisfies me when it surprises me," Bodo Rott said in an interview during an exhibition in 2014. - The viewer can be surprised again and again when looking at Rott's small-scale works. The gaze feels its way through the network of shapes and colors, at times almost gets lost, but then catches an object in the mesh again. 

Rott paints his proliferating pictorial worlds directly onto the canvas. In doing so, he works with graphic ingredients that he transfers to oil painting. His new pictorial language has crystallized from the previous group of works "non-children's children". Here the forms sometimes surrounded the sitters as accessories, now they become the main object. The line is the supporting element of his current works, which he titles the series "Hortus convulsus" (distorted garden). An allusion to the "Hortus conclusus", the closed garden, which plays a leading role in Christian iconography and Marian symbolism and is an important pictorial theme in the visual arts. The deliberate distortion of its pictorial elements results in a special optical appeal. Rott uses color to define individual segments and thus creates a structure. His figures, body parts, and vegetal ornaments, however, seem to defy the rules of perspective. One almost has the impression that it is a collage. Shading underlines this feeling and makes the canvas break up into the three-dimensional. Andreas Neufert has interpreted this illusionistic play between foreground and background as "simultaneous past, present and future". The relief-like character of his painting is characteristic and leaves the viewer of his works amazed and fascinated. (E.W., E.D.L., J.D.)