I have known Salman Khoshroo’s work for almost two years. He has continuously impressed us as an artist struggling for discovery, awareness and consciousness. He is constantly working in that path, getting craftier and finding new insights.

Salman’s work reveals a tumultuous tension between what he sees and what there is. He ambitiously goes farther in creating effects that reveal a flow of intimate sensation of his subject, live and breathing!

He is of course a natural draftsman. But his work reaches deeper than what can be seen.He captures the throbbing soul of his subject with translucent layers of colors and bold strokes of brush and knife. Translucent colors, rough knife strokes to let the refraction of light seduce us to see the invisible, to see the undepictable! He has a vision through clouds of conscious and revelations.

The ethereal dream he has when he is hi with the fever, in that special moment sparks in an arc to the canvas a stream of conscious and leaves in its wake hallucination and daydreaming. His work requires acute awareness and concentration to watch and explore, an interaction rather than observation.

Strikingly intense and agonizingly honest, original and powerful, the urgency of his feelings and sensations is contagious. His enchanted work is going to get validated more and more as he finds exposure.

Salman Khoshroo was born in 1983 in Tehran. He spent his early schooling years in New York City and in 2004 received his bachelor’s degree in Digital Arts from the Australian National University. Upon completing his studies he moved back to Iran, where he currently lives and works.

Although Salman has lived in two worlds, his artistic inspiration derives from Iran and therefor has chosen to make it his permanent home. He first started exploring his motherland through the lens of a camera and has held three photography exhibitions. In retrospect perhaps most of his photographs were the work of a suppressed painter. The artist still relies heavily on photographs for his painting practice.

Salman is a self-taught painter who enjoys the progressive experience of this art form. It has been four years since he first picked up the brush and his main influences are Lucian Freud and Claude Monet among others.

Before turning to painting, the artist photographed mostly abstract and minimalistic spaces in the streets of Tehran, but following 2009 photography in the streets was not feasible. As his artistic practice was forced more and more indoors, he adapted painting. Soon he grew intrigued and obsessed with this discipline and painted portraits of many of the people he knew.

Now in 2014 he holds his first exhibition displaying 10 of his most recent portraits.

The human face is the most familiar image we know. We are masters of detecting the most subtle emotions in people’s faces. Human skin is a canvas of expression. In a culture where representing the body is restricted, the uncovered flesh of the face becomes more significant.

The artist is a self-taught painter, receiving his formal education in Digital Arts. As his painting has progressed, styles have evolved and parallel techniques now exist simultaneously. In a digitally dominated world, the painter is still using his hands, while his head is mostly in cyberspace. The artist is constantly experimenting with paint, struggling to figure out the alchemy of color in a vast array of substances.

These 10 recent portraits make up the artist’s first painting exhibition. They follow in the train of 150 unexhibited works. Paint is applied across these big canvases using a palette knife. The knife is put to flesh, continually hacking at the paint, trying to force a lucky outcome. Using this energetic style, the artist exposes tensions while maintaining a geometric structure.

Four years ago the artist started to experiment with painting portraits. This also coincides with the rise of Facebook, which opened a new chapter in the culture of portraiture and heated the debates about identity, community, self-representation and so on. His subjects are all people he knows and got to know even better through the process of painting—where he contemplated and reflected on their deeper realities while spending long hours confronted by their portrait’s gaze.

The gloom of the times coupled with the pollution of Tehran, has left its mark on people’s faces. A generation shunned from the society at large, and eventually disenchanted by its own youth. Perhaps these people crave to be recognized and confronted across these vast canvases for the individuals they are. Even the tubes of paint have journeyed through a web of sanctions and color is scooped off the palette with an uneasy conscience.

سلمان خوشرو در سال ۱۳۶۲ در تهران متولد شد. او سالهای ابتدایی تحصیلات خود را در شهر نیو یورک سپری کرد و در سال ۱۳۸۳ مدرک لیسانس خود را در رشتهٔ هنر دیجیتال، از دانشگاه ملی‌ استرالیا دریافت کرد.

سلمان در دو دنیای متفاوت زندگی‌ کرده است، ولی‌ ذوق هنری او از ایران نشأت می‌گیرد، به همین دلیل ایران را برای سکونت دائمی انتخاب کرده است. او در ابتدا از لنز دوربین برای کشف سرزمین مادری خود استفاده کرده است و سه نمایشگاه عکاسی‌ در تهران برگزار کرده است. شاید بتوان گفت حتی کار عکاسی او بدنبال بیانی نقاش گونه بوده است. عکاسی‌ هنوز استفادهٔ زیادی در کار نقاشی او دارد.

از سنین کودکی سلمان علاقهٔ زیادی به هنر داشت. پرسه‌هایش در موزه‌های متروپلیتن و بعدا گالری ملی‌ استرالیا سبب شده است که هنرمند کارهای نقاشان بزرگ را از نزدیک تجربه کند. بزرگ شدن در مجاورت چنین موزه هایی تاثیر بسزایی در ذوق هنری او گذشته است.

سلمان فن نقاشی را بدون استاد فرا گرفته است، و چهار سال پیش برای اولین بار این کار را به عکاسی‌ و هنر دیجیتال ترجیح داد.

این هنرمند قبل از اینکه رو به نقاشی بیاورد، از صحنه‌های آبستره و مینیمال در خیابانهای تهران عکاسی‌ می‌کرده است، تا اینکه در سال ۱۳۸۸ عکاسی‌ در خیابا ن دیگر مقدور نبود. سلمان از این پس  فعالیت هنری‌اش را در فضای بسته انجام میدهد و به  نقاشی روی می اورد . او  به سرعت  شیفتهٔ این کار شد و پرتره های  بسیاری را  ترسیم  میکند.

 او هم‌اکنون اولین نمایشگاه نقاشی خود را برگزار می‌کند.

برای دیدن تمامی اثار این هنرمند، لطفا به وبسایت شخصی‌ او مراجعه کنید.