Andrei Roiter’s artistic practice for decades has concerned itself with finding ways to create visual statements about universal human experiences. In his new exhibition, Treasure Island, Andrei Roiter presents a new collection of painted abstract artefacts. Roiter spotlights these rather elemental forms and insists that they deserve our best attention.
In recent years, Andrei Roiter has moved towards a more personal and intuitive approach to image-making. Instead of deploying photography, as he did for many years, the artist allows for a more intuitive process in drawing and painting. Without reference to pre-existing images, these recent works are located somewhere between the familiar and the obscure. They transcend obvious definitions of abstraction and representation. Roiter wishes to translate complex and intangible experiences—solitude, melancholy, memory, hope and fear—into basic, fundamental forms, bringing to mind the work of Giorgio Morandi, whose simple shapes vibrate softly to touch us at our depths.
Architecture has long been a jumping off point for Andrei Roiter to address human conditions. Still following the rules of perspective, recent paintings show geometric shapes in line with minimalist sculpture and elements of modernist design, sometimes pointing to Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus. Roiter’s works abide in ambivalence; images often contain a lighted glow amidst darkness, danger or void, and it is uncertain which is winning. It seems as if these paintings are asking if there can be optimism within an all-enveloping shroud of uncertainty and doubt.