15/07/2018 Severine Grosjean
The year 1989 marked a turning point in political history when a wave of revolutions swept the Eastern bloc, beginning in Poland that led to the opening of the Berlin Wall in November, embracing the overthrow of the communist dictatorship in Romania in December and ending in December 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Known collectively as the 1989 Revolutions, they announced the beginning of the post-Cold War era.
Although a child in that time, Alexei’s artwork takes the viewer on a journey through oblivion and ruin, pointing out the uncomfortable past and questioning its influence in the future.
Through various media, paintings, videos and photographs, this young artist imagines innovative and passionate projects to describe and condemn the society that surrounds him: politics, religion, the weight of history. He invents an original and abundant artistic language.
Alexei Gordin takes the viewer to without emergency exits, inspired by moments of his personal life or places he discovered and observed.
In his work entitled “Between the past and the cosmos” (2013) Alexei composes a project about the disappearance of time and the cultural and social aspects that cross it. It is inspired by the history of the Russians, who emigrated to Ida-Viruma, the poorest part of Estonia, to work in the Soviet era. The buildings are empty and abandoned and the people are desperate. Faced with the passage of time, the characters of Alexei are notable for their lack of combat. We are fascinated by the weakness of these men. They get lost in a condition that exceeds them. Many series echo this condition that some people call antiheroes. For the artist, they are the creators or the destroyers of their work.
The vision of the world shared between Alexei and his characters is problematic, difficult and dangerous. Human bonds are fragile. In his work, Alexei paints a painful and unstable world full of unpleasant surprises. The character becomes passive contemplating his own descent into hell. We find this “absurdity” as the only means of survival in their work “March 1989 – August 2014” (2014)In the middle, they must find a balance between authentic impulses and social survival. He creates his own vision of the world and his own system. The suffering of humanity would come from the fact that humanity is in an intense search for itself. This investigation thus creates man’s incomprehension of his destiny, which he can no longer control, plunging him into a solitude that only he can understand. It shows a reflection on human nature.
Throughout his artistic career, Alexei Gordin wonders about his status as an artist as in “Art and Capitalism” (2015). He explores the complex relationships between the artist and the art market in “Art is not just fun anymore” (2017). He undergoes a tattoo session. It becomes his own work. During this personal experience, he stops time and the crazy race between the art market and the artist. The work will not leave him unlike his paintings that come and go according to sales. Echoing the theory of
the “liquid modernity” of the sociologist, Zygmunt Bauman who affirms that in the contemporary world change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty, artists must play the game. They must cooperate with the market although many despise it as a corrupting influence in the pursuit of art and authenticity. It seems absurd for the contemporary artist to fight in the predictability currents because unpredictability is the very essence of art. As an artist or man that is, Alexei Gordin asks the following question: How to remain human and be different when everything is done to be part of the mass?
To know more about Alexei Gordin go to @nomad_creative_projects or Alexei Gordin.
