Andrew Moore's images, by contrast, transcend politics. He photographs Russia's extremes – the rich and the poor, the awesome and the pitiful – with equal curiosity and without partisanship. He does not rhapsodize over the excess and pomp of capitalist Russia, but neither does he dismiss it, its superficiality notwithstanding.

In demonstrating as much interest in facades as what's behind them, he considers modern Russia on its own terms, and the Soviet Union and the imperial Russia that preceded it on theirs <…>

Andrew obtains a revolutionarily holistic and organic sense of a country that, for so many, derives its charm pre­cisely from the feelings of artifice it provokes. In a sense, he frees Russia from so many of the myths with which it has been endowed, and he finds it no less enchanting and infuriating. At a time when Russia's government doggedly confines itself to the present, Andrew's photographs are monuments to the nation's other lives. They are silent witnesses testifying to a different history.

In eschewing political agenda, Andrew liberates his work to peer past Russia's politics-an unprecedented accomplishment in a place where every aspect of life is politicized-and discover its other­worldly aesthetic <…>

The aesthetic also feels foreign because of its relentless clash of iconoclasm and tradition, a legacy of the Soviet Union's quick passage from the radical inclinations of the postrevolutionary years to the traditionalist stasis of the Stalin era <…>

Andrew Moore has captured all of this complexity in the concise poetry of an indi­vidual image. Taken together, his photographs comprise an other­worldly calculus of a profoundly troubled nation eternally uncertain of its place in the world. They perceive a Russia beyond politics and ideology and beyond the polarities that define its relationship with the West. Enclosed you will find Russia's nuanced history of itself, as told to Andrew by its buildings and people.

Boris Fishman

Exhibition curator – CM Art Gallery

6, rue des Grands Degrés, 75005 PARIS