The Alphabet of Lost Order consists of an ongoing series of photographs, drawings, collages, and paintings. The Archive is an important facet of it — a collection of both altered and unaltered Polaroids, now numbering more than a thousand images. Ter Braak often paints over a Polaroid in such a way that the photographic and the painted layers merge seamlessly.
The Polaroids can serve as the starting point for yet other works. He enlarges and manipulates them, layering and combining multiple images. In doing so, he sharpens the layered image while simultaneously freeing it from any single, fixed meaning — an approach that applies to all his work.
Ter Braak photographs the fleeting and the neglected, the unseen, the painful, the moving and the changeable — such as a shrub pressing against its fence in full bloom or tree stumps jutting out of the ground. These are fragments of landscape that seem to yearn for something more. For Ter Braak, they are manifestations of defiant beauty, perseverance, and resistance. He perceives in them a kind of order and narrative that eludes our understanding but which, when transposed, can take on mythical proportions. He zooms in, leaving the surrounding context out of frame, allowing them to tell their own story — sometimes intensified by painterly interventions.
What may seem devoid of overt moral or political engagement, in fact, reveals a deep sense of involvement with the world around us — for those who can read the signs of the human condition within them.
