The first thing that springs to mind when we think of a landscape is a horizon, a line between the earth and the sky. After all, our perception of the world begins at eye level. In Gerco de Ruijter's photographs, however, any reference to this level is lost. His camera faces straight down, there is no horizon. So can we still call them landscape photos? Do we experience the landscape in them? They don’t seem to bear any relation to our daily experience of the world around us. What we see is as flat as a pancake, no deeper than the photographic paper, a playful composition of shapes, lines, and colours.

De Ruijter attaches his camera to a kite, a simple toy made of pieces of cloth and some sticks. He lets the wind guide him. If he thinks the kite is hovering over a captivating landscape, he takes a shot with a small transmitter. In other words, instead of looking through the viewfinder, he allows the kite’s perspective to surprise him. He has to wait until he’s at home, and has developed the negatives, to see what he has photographed.

De Ruijter’s photos reveal unexpected creations of colours and lines. Although it is often not easy to see a landscape in them, there are unmistakeable elements that refer to it. The photos float between the recognizable and the abstract. They seem to hesitate between depictions of fields, marshes, canals, tree tops and an abstract painting reminiscent of Mondrian’s horizontal and vertical lines or, quite differently, Jean Dubuffet’s art brut. You look at them the way you examine a gestalt picture: Is it a duck or a hare? Or in De Ruijter’s case: Is it a landscape or abstract art?

Or is it both? Perhaps the images fascinate us because although they convey the earth and landscapes we know, they offer a perspective that we, with both feet on the ground, can only dream of. As a viewer, you shift back and forth from recognition to surprise. They are pictures of the earth, but at the same time they seem to have flown away from it, and it is as though you lose grip on the world there and then. You become literally uprooted.

De Ruijter does not look through the viewfinder, yet he has an undeniable sense of what his kite can capture. He calls them ‘borderlands': areas where two types of landscape touch. Furthermore, he scans the tactility of the landscape. He can more or less predict what texture the earth will reveal to his camera from above. The landscapes form his material, like an artist’s tubes of paint.

De Ruijter’s photos lift you out of the concreteness of the world, and what you get in return is something completely new, a new reality, a new landscape: an earth which you seem to be able to both dig in and admire endlessly.

Peter Delpeut (Cineast and writer)