Andrei Roiter | Bon Voyage

By David Coggins and Wilma Sütö

He is the traveller who sends us on our way: Andrei Roiter, born in Moscow, has been commuting between Amsterdam and New York since 1990. Bon Voyage is a motto for his work, but also an encouragement and a greeting to the visitor who arrives at this work from the opposite direction. The artist and his audience intersect along the way: the provisional end point of one is the starting point of the other; art is both meeting point and intermediate station.

Roiter’s work cannot be described in purely formal terms, even though it is indebted to Russian Constructivism. Roiter’s work is less detached. He does not make abstract icons. The subtle, meditative nature of his sculptures and paintings is closely connected to everyday life.

Roiter, who studied at the Architecture Institute in Moscow, draws the scenery of his own life as a passer-by, giving it the power of metaphor. He creates numerous small buildings: models of waiting rooms, viewpoints, toilets, neighbourhood spaces and study rooms. These are fragile palisades, assembled by hand from scraps of material that can come from the street, but also from his own studio or library. They stick together as irregularly as a makeshift carpenter’s tree house. Planks and pieces of cardboard are supported by books, sometimes by photographs and notebooks. It is an architecture with character and soul, and therefore also the shelter of choice for those who are forced into inner emigration, the emigration of the heart.

Language: English

Published by post editions, Rotterdam 2010

ISBN 978 94 6083 035 8