User:Gerco de Ruijter/sandbox

Gerco de Ruijter
(Vianen 1961) is a visual artist from the Netherlands. He studied in The Hague and in Rotterdam and was winner of the Drempelprize for autonomous Art in 1993. De Ruijter experiments with the eye of the camera in an unusual way. He photographs landscapes with a camera attached to a kite. The intenstity of these images seems to contradict the simplicity of their creation. The absence of a horizon, our eye's normal orientation point, creates a curious and enigmatic abstraction, by which de Ruijter's photographs are closer to painting than to documentary photography. The viewer gets caught up in de Ruijter's amazement with the beauty of what is practically imperceptible to the human eye -even unattainable- but which can be made visible with help of the camera's mechanical eye.

De Ruijter’s photographs, or rather: the images he carefully selects, reveal an unthought-of play of colors and lines. Often, it is not easy to recognize the landscape even if definite elements give indications. The images dwell between the recognizable and the abstract; depending on where De Ruijter sends up his kite, they hesitate to acknowledge if they are pastures, salt marshes, canals, tree tops, or rather an abstract painting with Mondrianesk or Art Brut qualities. Like the Gestalt image: is it duck, or hare? De Ruijter’s question is: landscape, or abstract? Or both? This indeed is what makes it so fascinating: the viewer commutes from sensation to sensation. The images are nothing more than pictures of the earth. At the same time, though, they have detached themselves from the earth and it is as if the viewer loses grip. (Peter Delpeut, Pleidooi voor het Treuzelen, 2011)

In his films, he has used pigeons (Letting Go, 2008-2010) and a large amount of collected images found in Google Earth for CROPS (2012) and Playground (2014). CROPS and Playground are both stop-motion animation films and have a movie format defined by their subject. The sound for these films was made by Michel Banabila.