In addition to being an artist, Roiter is a philosopher, a historian and a humorist. In his elliptical way, he deals with culture gap while at the same time searching for commonality. By reframing both past and and present in terms of a somewhat idiosyncratic PRIVATE MYTHOLOGY Roiter seems to have deliberately placed himself in a peripatetic, distanced relationship to history and culture. Roiter's artistic vocabulary has a certain post-utopian reticence. His materials are usually simple, unobtrusive, and sometimes seem as if they have been used already. They once more express the fact that historic dreams of perfect utopias have long since had their day.

Central themes in Roiter's oeuvre are history, memory, communication and secrets; humankind is always depicted as inhabiting environments wherein it seems incapable of exerting any influence. In the late eighties, the great part of Roiter's work was painted a shade of brownish-green - ubiquitous in his native Moscow, where countless gallons of this drab olive had been used to cover everything from hospital walls to military hardware - as if to emphasize the way in which he carries his own world wherever he goes.

Despite the quintessentially Russian color he chose for so many of his works, Roiter seems to be as far away from the land of his birth as he is from his present adopted home(s). Taken as a group, his pieces can be seen as a playful scheme to invent his OWN PRIVATE GEOGRAPHY, like a child's special secret imaginary world. Empty and silent, his cheerfully lumpy objects function somewhat paradoxically as little portable pieces of home. This wistful visual memonics are not just for Mother Russia, however, but for HOME, the verdant, mythical/historical place of sunny skies: for another, more innocent time, before all the rules were changed on us. A circular configuration of slots, either drawn or actually piercing the surface of the work, resemble the speaker grille of an old-fashioned radio. These enigmatic holes decorate everything from cardboard boxes which are called "speakers" or "text containers", an edition of T-shirts to a concrete-covered milk carton. They are clearly meant to suggest that there is some kind of HIDDEN VOICE inside or (sub)text to these works.

Continuing to work in painting, drawing, photography and sculpture, Roiter's installations from the early nineties required the viewer to have an OPEN MIND and a sense of humor when looking at his strange images, particularly a variety of pictorial representations of the potato. One drawing from 1994, entitled Potato World Unlimited, diagrams his POETIC ICONOGRAPHY based on his PERSONAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SIMPLEST GEOMETRIC SHAPES. A circle shape for him could symbolize a head which then equates to a globe on a stand and then to a magnifying glass, a symbol which reappears in his other works. Much of Roiter's works may be regarded as a flexible, expandable and contractible inventory of symbols observed in ordinary existence. For him, daily life is itself a meaningful, intriguing moviescape, rich in its own playful symbolism. Roiter has created an OBSCURE COLLECTION of images and an index of his relationship to personal history, found history, and those new encounters that are difficult to name. However illusions of an overall pattern quickly dissolve in this inventive realm of uncanny associations, the place where Roiter hones to his skills as a tourist and artist.

He does not wish to offer easy categories of visual or verbal language; his way of communication would be through oblique gestures that embody an intimately distanced view of things. In-direction seems to be more expressive of his state than any didactic explanation; he prefers to submit life to the TESTS OF METAPHOR AND ALLEGORY.

Currently focussing on painting, Roiter's inspirations are street artifacts which he encounters in his daily surroundings and documents through photographs. Not limited to found objects, these artifacts are often simple shapes and shadows which he endlessly collects as "memory souvenirs". Roiter then translates these images into the language of "social realistic painting", a style which reveals his Soviet Russian origins.

The paintings and watercolors offer us fresh ways of seeing familiar objects as if discovering them for the first time. In this way, his works bring to mind the sketches and studies of a naturalist or an archaeologist. They may also be seen as doodles on the margins of an existing but not yet written text. For Roiter painted images exist as "head notes', as poetic comments on the HIDDEN SYMBOLISM OF EVERYDAY REALITY. His paintings unite the CLASSICAL LANGUAGE of painterly realism with the casual INTIMACY OF THE SNAPSHOT.

After working in the medium of complex installations, Roiter has now found a way through his paintings to express his vision of the traveller's "land/life-scape' as an open air museum. Gradually, Roiter is building a pictorial archive which he sees as a MONUMENT OF THE PRESENT TO THE FUTURE.