Dmitry Rotkin “Landscape tragedy”

Not an exposition, but industrial backyards, the illusion of urban space, the unsightly world of the author’s inner isolation. His life path has no direction – it is flannery, aimless wanderings and wanderings around the neighborhood. The photographer focuses on the absurdity of what is happening, chaos and dirt, so the focus of his camera is often aimed at places, people and events that are unattractive to the public eye. But, for Dmitry, this unkempt, multi-layered texture is an island of truth, which is beautiful in itself. As Oscar Wilde wrote: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Perhaps that is why the works presented are perceived as fragments of memory, crumpled drafts and recordings of traces of the existence of “no” person in harsh land.

The first location of this exhibition is the back street. Here is a series of works “A look through the neck of a bottle” or how some of them are signed: “Collected Works”. Purely visually, she mirrors with the Ai Wei Wei series “Fuck off”, where the artist shows the middle finger to the sights and monuments that are significant in the world. But Dmitry does not act so literally, he interacts with chamber, “unknown” open spaces on an intuitive level. The gesture of the “outstretched bottle” itself is read like a toast and a desire to clink glasses with the horizon, to make friends with it and to learn better. The landscape suddenly becomes the photographer a pleasant conversationalist with whom he wants to share a moment, drink for an acquaintance and say in Faustian style: “Stop, a moment! You are beautiful. ” On one side is the habitat and its surroundings (Petersburg and the Lenin Oblast). On the contrary – abroad, these are types of Italian cities (Naples and Venice) and the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Another location is a block fence. It contains pictures with almost musical rhythms: urban spaces and situations in which you find yourself by chance. Here, the author refuses direct participation and acts as an observer, viewer of a nonexistent film. The works on the left side alternate on the principle of absence and presence, playing with objects and phantom entities. Illustrative in this regard is the photograph “The Muse of Our Devastation” – with a bust of a nymph on the cover of a yard dump. The right half of the concrete wall is occupied by unsightly rabble, people who drink or are in oblivion. These are the resting kebabs who flooded the suburbs like insects, and the adhering wandering artists, and the homeless, or rather their flattened bodies.

The tragedy of the landscape, therefore, is not a description of the plot, but the existential experience of the author of the phenomenon of death and rebirth in nature. The inevitability of the end and breaking through of a new life, a wretched, but such acute beauty of suffering and imperfection.

More work at rotkin.tumblr.com

Text: Katya Mikhatova
Music: Pechora