Tamara Luuk

Curator's foreword

Alexei Gordin: Deliberately Neutral, Mockingly Witty

Alexei Gordin’s self-fashioned, forthrightly stated artist persona is grounded above all in his painting. His photography, less visible in exhibition spaces, is often seen more as a supporting tool for his other work than as an independent practice.

The exhibition at Tallinn Art Hall’s City Gallery highlights the significant role of photography within Alexei Gordin’s wide-ranging practice. Though less often discussed, his remarkably rich and intriguing photographic archive broadens the ways of being – both in life and in art – that define him. Photography extends the critically comical realism already central to his painting, capturing unmediated fragments of the world around us. Familiar themes surface here as well: the nostalgia of abandoned buildings and the messages scrawled in graffiti; critique mixed with loud laughter at both himself and society; the secure authority of art institutions contrasted with the precariousness of artists; and the economics of the art market and galleries, where income is controlled from above, leaving the creator caught and constrained in between.

As paradoxical as the hidden allure of decaying buildings is the fragile interdependence of the art world’s poorly oiled machinery. Alexei Gordin, who draws collapsing interiors and messages written to no one out of the solitude of ruins and places them before the art audience and potential buyers, knows these contradictions all too well – for they lie at the very foundation of his work.

Life-loving snapshots and video clips

It is no coincidence that we focus on Alexei’s Instagram Stories – the phone photos made by millions today, appearing and vanishing in a constant stream, accessible to all, with no museum ticket or gallery rental fee. Among his thousands of snaps, which capture the decorous and the less decorous moments of everyday life, one finds images of surprising beauty. Taken by someone with a trained eye and a keen sense of wonder, they are mostly landscapes and cityscapes, shot locally and on the road. If we set aside the graffiti that accompanies the memory, decay, and dereliction of human-made buildings and interiors, there is little grotesque or irony here; instead, there is the beauty of colour, light, and form – an aesthetic neither singled out by critics nor emphasised by the artist himself. Without seeking to stake a claim in the art world, these snapshots teach us to love the life we too easily lose sight of while busy criticising ourselves and others.

Gordin’s photographic eye is that of a painter: the flatness and lack of depth typical of phone images are offset by carefully chosen angles and the natural play of colour and light. Yet his painter’s vision reaches different conclusions than those of many contemporary painters who use photography.¹ The expressive power of Gordin’s canvases is illustrative; the material qualities of paint remain secondary, while the sentences inscribed across the surface leave little room for misinterpretation. His painting practice – though more time- and energy-intensive – carries the urgency of poster-like documentary, while his documentary-style photography lacks this quality.

Aesthetically Charged Emotion

What most clearly distinguishes Gordin’s photography from his painting is the degree of aesthetic charge. At first, comparing the two mediums may seem misplaced; yet when their shared realism is taken into account, the emotions they carry become especially striking. As a painter, Gordin often treats values and moral categories with deliberate neutrality and a sharply ironic wit. In contrast, the aesthetic restraint of his photographs conveys a thirst for life, the joy of discovery, and cathartic beauty.

More and more, artists from the Russian cultural sphere are turning to beauty and poetics as a shared language, turning away from conceptual messages that they often regard with skepticism and caution.² Beauty and poetics are also recognised by many Estonians – although equally wary and sceptical of both. Another point of mutual understanding between Estonia’s two communities, Estonian and Russian, is nature itself. An Estonian eye easily distinguishes the traces of human intervention from nature’s own self-sufficiency, sensing its strength and resilience – qualities absent from history and needing no translation into everyday speech. The same is true for Gordin. He travels as often as he can³, and whether in natural or urban settings, he is fascinated by the expansiveness of landscapes – many of which he has captured through his lens.

Easing Lightness and the Strength of Being

Though neither Estonian nor Russian by nationality, Gordin was born in Tomsk as a descendant of deportees and, after Estonia regained independence, returned to his ancestral home in Pärnu. He studied first at Pärnu’s Russian-language high school, and later at the Estonian Academy of Arts and the University of the Arts in Helsinki. While fluent in both English and Estonian, he feels most at home in a Russian-speaking environment. Gordin has spoken openly about the generational conflict within the Russian community, yet it is unlikely that his own intelligence and sensibility spare him from the spiritual nomadism and living in constant state of transition.⁴ From this likely stems his turning toward the past, where only decay remains⁵, and the paradoxical awareness of the gap between, on the one hand, an immense scope of activity and a longing for openness, and on the other, the narrowness of circumstances and the attitudes of a small, insular community wary of outsiders.

Although the axe of uncertainty hangs over Alexei as it does over his Estonian compatriots, for him it cuts deeper. The awareness of life’s transience seems to grant him both a relieving lightness and a resilient strength in the world. The heavy burden of the insoluble futility of belonging⁶ is tempered by Gordin’s bright, sociable character; his passionate – if contradictory – relationship with the art of the capitalist era; and his hopeful trust in the omnipotence of nature and time, which will one day outlast the conflicts of human relations.

Always in Flux, Always Fresh

Although trained as a painter, Alexei is no stranger to photography. As a schoolboy and later as a young student, he won awards in photo competitions organised both in his hometown of Pärnu and at the state level. Yet “professional” seems the most ill-fitting word for him. Gordin’s real charm and purpose lie in his ability to remain an eternal amateur – someone for whom art matters deeply, but life itself is even more compelling. “How to stop living and start painting?” reads a witty inscription on one of his canvases depicting a cemetery. The artist himself, however, remains fresh and “in”: his freshness comes from the openness of his disposition, while his understanding of contemporaneity aligns with the critical sensibility that characterises today’s art field. “I consider myself an artist, an explorer, and a good person,” Alexei tells Pavel Golovkin in an interview.⁷ That he is also a kind and caring friend is echoed in an exclamation he once borrowed from someone’s wall graffiti and reposted on Instagram: “Just hold off on dying, maybe we’ll come up with something!” – «Да погоди ты умирать, может что-нибудь придумаем!»

… … 2021/2025

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2021/2025