The best answer is a complex one.

It is a movement that emerged slowly and meticulously from Davood Roostaei's early thoughts and artistic experiences - over a decade from his first attempts as an 18-year-old art student in Iran to an excited young and aspiring artist when he became an excited young and aspiring artist in the late 1980s immigrated to Germany.
But he soon recognized its limitations and turned to Abstract Realism, Surrealism and Impressionism.
As a political activist, he even took on the politicized art form of graffiti, which earned him an arrest and two years in prison. After his release in 1984, he realized that his artistic life needed another place to grow and thrive. He received asylum in Germany, the perfect place to pursue an artistic career in the 80s and 90s.
In Germany, his work attracted the attention of the art historian and critic Hanns Theodor Flemming. Together with Flemming, he not only found his artistic feet, but also a way to articulate his way of working. He combined his early thoughts and artistic practices, which included realism, abstract realism, impressionism and surrealism, while immersing himself in an early phase of eroticism and sexual exploration.
So if you want the Cole notes on cryptorealism, it's a flow from abstract surrealism, if you will, to a more mature rendering of the inevitability of making art that attempts to represent the world we live in.
These theoretical developments were also accompanied by methodological experiments. Jackson Pollock's abandonment of color inspired Roostaei to follow suit, but his path was slightly different. Yes, he followed Pollock by splattering paint on canvas, but he structured it with his fingers, alternating between squirting paint, depicting images with his fingers, and then splattering paint over his work again. These were the seeds of cryptorealism – the abstract expressionism he had learned from Pollock; Impressionism, learned from the French masters; Surrealism's doctrine of the absurd juxtaposition of images; then the sweetness of magical realism that takes us to fantastic places.
Roostaei knew that there would be a new magic beyond magical realism, beyond abstract expressionism, beyond impressionism, beyond surrealism, and he found it in the creation of cryptorealism. This unique and revolutionary painting style originally emerged in 1987 and was initially referred to as abstract surrealism before being aptly named cryptorealism in 1990.
Roostaei has taken cryptorealism to a new level. He is dedicated to painting with his fingers, as he has to put one layer on top of another, a technique that by definition puts one image on top of another.
Yes, you see the vivid splash of color, but after just a pause you realize that there is an image behind it, or is it two, or maybe three, beneath this blaze of color.
Cryptorealism is what has defined Roostaei's work since 1990. More than three decades have now passed since he put it together in Germany in the late 1980s.