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INTUITIVE NATURE

Geometric Roots & Organic Foundations

If abstraction is a language, Jan Van Der Ploeg is a grammarian.

His visual language is reduced to a set of essential parameters, but he goes wild within that restricted space.

Van Der Ploeg’s paintings consequently inhabit another dimension in the non-objective universe, taking a decisive path at the

crossroads of contraction and expansion.

He took the exit toward contraction and reduction.

Or towards the realm, Mies van der Rohe famously consecrated with the phrase “less is more.”

His most recent work draws inspiration from record sleeve designs by Josef Albers for Command Records in the late 1950s and early

1960s.

Like Albers, Van Der Ploeg economizes his visual repertoire only to turn what might be minimal into maximal compositional inventions.

Shane McAdams

The Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, Ashland

October 5 through December 9, 2023