Mark Raidpere

Mark Raidpere (Tallinn, 1975, lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia) is a scrutinizer of the fate of solitary figures, observed in Estonia and in the Baltic countries, placed on the margins of society and collective attention. His works are able to combine a lucid analytical aspect together with an intense emotional participation with the subjects represented, giving rise to an amazing ability to portray, observing the dynamics of desire, loneliness and violence.

Majestoso Mystico (2007) is a diptych in which two musicians, Russian and Sweden, play at the artist’s request the soundtrack of The Silence of the Lambs by Howard Shore on the streets of Stockholm. The artist has assembled images of this performance with those of the violent clashes that struck in 2007 the center of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, following the decision of the government of the country to remove a monument dedicated to the soldiers of the Soviet Red Army. This gesture of symbolic cancellation triggered the violence of Estonian citizens of Russian origin who, in claiming the traces of their historical memory, devastated the center of the capital in protest. The casual coincidence between his stay in Stockholm and the days of the clashes in Tallinn, led Raidpere to combine the two scenes, his shot in Sweden and the images recovered from the events in Estonia. In Majestoso Mystico the peaceful serenity of the streets of Stockholm, crossed by the sinister presage of the music of Howard Shore, approaches the tragic images of the clashes in Tallinn, demonstrating all the anguish and the powerlessness of the artist for the explosion of ethnic violence in his city, one of the new capitals of the European Union after its entry in 2004.

Andrej (2006) shows the performance of a young dancer in a Latvian gay club, observed by Raidpere in the wonder of his almost naive and unconscious sensuality, all tending towards a future of desire, success and wealth. Personal portrait but also of an epochal social and cultural change, Andrej captures the viewer with the strength of a raw and direct document, in which the artist’s strategy reveals all the ambivalence of his gaze, made of empathy and analytical lucidity, involvement and detachment.

The obsession of the artist for the realization of portraits of people dear to him is manifested in two separate works, Father (2001), the debut video work of Raidpere, and Dedication (2008), the last one realized. In the first the figure of the artist’s father appears, presented in the melancholy of his small apartment, between memories, voices, silent gestures and a general atmosphere of unease and gloomy solitude, accentuated by the sepulchral tones of the soundtrack. Dedication instead celebrates the proximity of the two parents of the artist, asked to pose by Raidpere in the intimacy of a silent close-up, accompanied by the notes of a music by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür.

All images Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli
© Danilo Donzelli