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Kunsthalle Recklinghausen
The Strange
Life of Andrei Roiter’s Objects
The French Dadaist and Surrealist painter Francis Picabia
once said that god made our heads round so that our thinking can change
direction. Andrei Roiter’s art changes direction all the time. I think much
of that has to do with his permanent state of dislocation. Roiter’s head is
not only round but two-headed; it looks in more than one direction at a time
(usually east towards Moscow and west towards New York).
In his book on the art of collecting: The Strange Life of
Ojects, Maurice Rheims distinguishes three types of collectors: the
dedicated collector who is animated by a desire to own everything; the
dilettante who collects more or less without system; and the curiosity
hunter who looks out for the unexpected rather than the beautiful and
precious. Most artists are collectors and Roiter belongs undoubtedly in the
last category. He is a “curio-artist”, continuously on the look-out for
whimsical, often silly objects, which at closer look; reveal themselves to
be deeply metaphysical or existential: dysfunctional appliances, discarded
boxes, or abandoned signs. He collects these things by either taking them to
his studio or capturing their image with his digital camera, without which
he never leaves home. They reappear in his drawings and paintings or become
sculpture.
Like jokes, Roiter’s objects have a relationship to the
subconscious. According to Freud, dreams and jokes relate to the
subconscious in different ways: dreams serve to spare us Unlust (displeasure);
jokes, to yield pleasure. Jokes are like games whose prize money comes in
the form of Lust (pleasure or jouissance). Roiter’s objects should be
considered part of a language-game – in the sense of Wittgenstein’s model of
a child’s learning languages by pointing and naming. Roiter’s objects are
ostensible, always pointing and naming but resulting in a private language (another
notion from Wittgenstein’s repertoire) that uses the techniques of the joke,
as described by Freud – displacement, errors in reasoning, non-sense, etc. –
to carefully obscure meaning just enough to provide a little pleasure, or to
use another Freudian expression, Vorlust (pre-pleasure). They are objects
that tease the truth but stop short at foreplay.
All artists are tricksters; their relationships to truth are,
to say the least, elastic. The trickster artist Duchamp is the forefather of
postmodern art, and Hermes, the messenger between gods and mortals, himself
a notorious trickster (and Hermeneutics’s namesake), is its patron saint.
Roiter is a trickster artist who speaks, like Hermes, with two tongues and
plays with his objects like Wittgenstein with his building blocks, slabs and
beams, in order to confuse as well as amuse.
By Klaus Ottmann
In: Cat. Andrei Roiter, Inscapes, Kunsthalle
Rechlinghausen, 2004
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David Coggins, Review in
MODERN PAINTERS, March 2006
ANDREI ROITER: NO PEOPLE
Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam
19 november - 24 december 2005
Andrei Roiter's
furtive, hazy paintings are so diffuse they nearly evaporate before your
eyes. Solitary objects float over temperate backgrounds, at once ethereal
and lonely. The paintings are less assertive icons than they are hovering
memories – elegies to places that no longer exist.
Roiter's new
exhibition is a surprisingly wistful, even tender, examination of his
own disillusionment. A Russian who lives between Amsterdam and New York,
Roiter is concerned with the restless and the remote. He paints in a loose,
translucent manner that recalls Luc Tuymans, without the fraught, airless
atmosphere.
Roiter collects
images, often keeping them for years before painting them, and there is a
cherished quality to his work, a frayed romanticism. Just Above the
Crowd
(2005) is a spare, small house tilted in the air and pushed across a
deserted landscape, out of place and time. The paint, thin and gauzy,
flickers gently, more atmosphere than matter.
In The
Curious (2005), a lone traveller faces away from the viewer, rucksack
strapped to his back, a suitcase at his feet. The looseness of the
brushstrokes and the brown palette resemble a Goya sketch. Hovering between
idleness and action, the figure is the embodiment of displacement.
Everday objects
– a chair, a dilapidated box – become meaningful through Roiter's humane
treatment. Even better is Under the Flag (2005), an umbrella that
could sit at a café table or on the beach, yet is suspended in the lush blue
air. With a minimum of design, Roiter evokes leisure and languor: our
collective desire for desire.
The imagery is
less succesfull when it is more cartoon-like. In The waiting Area
(2005), silhouetted figures with animal heads sit idly in an airport lounge.
Neither acidly satiric (like Hogarth's Marriage A-la Mode; 1743), nor
slyly grotesque (like Guston's Nixon series), it's commentary without
enough nuance or bite.
The Wall From
My studio
(2005) is on firmer ground. A wooden panel propped against the gallery wall
is pinned with small photographs and drawings. Its physicality contrasts
with the elusiveness of the paintings. Matter of fact without being glib,
Roiter reveals the sources of his work: the method to his melancholy.
Old Russian
House
(2003) is a decaying structure whose missing roof exposes beams underneath.
Its sadness is offset by a shimmering strip of aquamarine across the bottom
of the canvas. Like much of Roiter's world, the house is abandoned but not
unloved. Roiter avoids sentimentality and daring in favour of bittersweet,
temporary relief.
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