Lex ter Braak. The Archive of the Alphabet of Lost Order

The Alphabet of Lost Order consists of an ongoing series of photographs, drawings, collages, and paintings. The Archive is a vital facet of this, comprising manipulated and unmanipulated Polaroids—a growing collection of more than 1,000 photographs. Ter Braak frequently paints onto a Polaroid in such a way that the photographic layer and the painted layer bleed into one another.

The Polaroids can serve as the starting point for further works. He enlarges and reworks them, mounting them in overlapping layers. In doing so, he brings the layered image into sharp focus while simultaneously liberating it from singularity of meaning—an intention that underpins all his work.

Ter Braak photographs the fleeting and the neglected, the unseen, the painful, the shifting and mutable—such as a bush resisting its fence even as it blooms, or tree stumps protruding from the earth. These are fragments of landscape longing for more. For Ter Braak, they are so many manifestations of idiosyncratic beauty, persistence, and resistance. In them, he discerns an order and a narrative that elude our comprehension, yet when transposed can assume mythical proportions. He zooms in, cropping out the context so that they may tell their own story, at times heightened by painterly interventions. Any explicit moralising or political engagement seems absent, but whoever can read the signs of the human condition within them perceives a profound engagement with the world around us.