UCR/California Museum of Photography is delighted to once again have the opportunity to bring Dutch artist Jean Ruiter's work to Southern California. Reciprocally, Jean has been one of the prime movers in bringing California photography to northern Europe. Yet, Ruiter's artistic practice counters much that Europeans understand as the photographic aesthetic: it is neither a seamless depiction of a real moment -- the finding of order out of ordinary, daily, visual chaos -- nor an inquiry into the psychological resonance of the pictorial. Ruiter's highly original work derives in part from the experiments of twentieth century American painters including Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. It presents a collaged and fabricated world in which the photograph is only one element in a layered commentary. More complex than a simple variation on this fundamentally American idiom, Ruiter's photo-work is thoroughly European in its obsession, methodology, and presentation. Its essential concern is not synoptic or acquisitive as is Rauschenberg's. Nor does it mimic Rauschenberg's archetypal American belief that painting can "act in that gap between art and life." Ruiter's photo-works rather act in the gap between the present and the past. Indeed, Ruiter's work is underwritten by that primary European obsession with analyzing contemporary culture in light of Europe's own classical history.