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Terra Cultura
by Robert Lunsingh Scheurleer

Fragments of Culture
Jean Ruiter employs photography. He uses his camera, his material and light to realize whatever his minds conceives.
Since the beginning of Photography artists are capturing the truth through their lenses. Ruiter says he realizes that a photograph represents only a minimal and congealed moment of reality. It is a fragment of life determined by exposure time and diaphragm. Its expressive and dramatic intensity results from the emotion the spectator experiences. Photographs will fade and reduce to dust. That is what they have in common with all monuments of human invention. A trip to the countries of the ancients, like the one Jean Ruiter made, is a confrontation wit h time, the devourer of all things. Each ruin proves that time is the final conqueror. Time has no mercy. With the sharp edge of his scythe he mows wherever it suits him. Why do we call him father time? He hasn’t got any paternal feelings: he devastates without mercy. Gerard Lairesse, a real pictor doctus, who lived in the eighteenth century, designed the frontispiece of the catalogue of ancient sculptures of Gerard Reynst, a merchant and collector: he pictures time as an athletic old man, wearing a sand glass on top of his head and just about to execute his destructive work amidst ancient marbles, sculptures, busts and remnants of shafts. Only a woman, Prudentia, prevents him from doing so. She is the one who guides out judgement, proposes and disposes. The collector Reynst flattered by this picture: he considered himself represented by Prudentia. He thought his activity as a collector could prevent his share of petrified Antiquity from being shipwrecked by time. Prevent? We know better. Even if Prudentia is our guide, each museum, each cherished ruin is only a remnant of civilization, until now spared by time, but awaiting its destruction.
It is clear that Reynst, like all collectors, tried to build up a new reality with these fragments. For a collection is the mirror of a civilization.

The works of Jean Ruiter deal with civilization, culture and their transience. They find their place in a long tradition of collecting and arranging. In huge panels we see the debris of temples and triumphal arcs reflected, and new bonds established between the remains of marble saints and heroes. These panels worship ruins as a source of inspiration. Here the traveler around the borders of the Mediterranean Sea, the mare internum, has been guided by his imagination and, by rearranging the fragments of the past, gave them a new meaning.