Passion for Art
December
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About Matthew Ritchie
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December 2011
THE BIG BANG
For an artist who takes no less than the concept of the cosmos as the starting point for his artistic exploration, and refers to his canon of work thus far as, “a constantly evolving drawing of my personal universe,” Matthew Ritchie’s studio in a nondescript building in the Garment district of midtown Manhattan seems, at first glance, wholly unassuming.
Ritchie welcomes me into a large rectangular sun-filled room -- orderly and extremely peaceful --especially considering the cacophony of New York noise and chaos just outside the building, Ritchie is alone, cradling a cup of steaming herbal tea, and apologizing for a confusion about our meeting time. The studio holds few clues to the workings of Ritchie’s ever-churning mind.
A boyish looking 47-year old British-born American transplant, Ritchie is surprisingly humble and lacking in arrogance. With a thatch of thick gray hair and a warm and open smile and style, the artist who is currently thriving in a mid-career. Garnering rave reviews and spawning a plethora of articles seeking to explain his work, Ritchie appears and behaves more like a nurturing English professor than an artistic genius.
There are drawings stacked neatly against walls, several uncluttered work tables with computers. A few sequined and feathered masks scattered on a counter that Ritchie explains he is designing for an upcoming performance of his latest show “Monstrance” in Venice Beach, California are the only clue towards Ritchie’s bent towards the theatrical.
THE INTIMIDATION FACTOR
For a man chosen in 2001 by Time Magazine as “one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought,” I was understandably intimidated by our first meeting, certain that my lack of scientific or mathematical knowledge would make me feel tongue-tied. Yet that initial intimidation is immediately wiped away by the artist’s eagerness to talk about his work, his patient explanations, and his lack of condescension. It occurs to me that Ritchie is used to meeting people who are not as smart as he is and the fact that humor and irony are a large part of what make Matthew Ritchie tick, makes him approachable . Coupled with this his voracious curiosity and obvious love of life and intellectual inquiry is infectious.
Ritchie’s “art”, an inadequate word to describe his multi-media output of drawings, paintings, large scale public pavilions, light installations and performances -- is based, he explains, on what he describes as “My journey to explore: ‘systems of knowledge’ -- those that already exist and those that I make up. Ritchie uses these systems, he says, “to create the personal ‘working model’ on which my visual language is based.I perpetually recombines these systems into a ‘super-positional state’ that both extends the space of painting and I attempt to recover meaning from the complexity and entropy of modern life. I work across multiple disciplines, applying this model to a specific “site”; which can be an idea, a place or a time”.
This theory-laden explanation, however, belies Ritchie’s equal fervor for a sense of fun in his work.
For example, in the midst of an explanation of how he came to the idea of using modular fractal geometry as a modular template for work exploring the elasticity (or lack thereof of the universe), he casually throws in the fact that his latest paintings, slated for his inaugural show in LA he has created a series of paintings based on “angels” and monsters”. “I have tried to evoke representations of ‘high energy states’ in the angel works which include as references, pole dancers, solar storms and female athletes, while my “monster” paintings are meant to reflect of ‘negative energy states.’ They are each devoted to a famous monster from a popular film,” he speeds up. “Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy and the Wolfman and are also address the negative energy theme with sources from surgery, terror attacks and video games to ecological disasters”.
After this litany, delivered with almost child-like enthusiasm, I come to the conclusion that although Ritchie is clearly the savant he has been anointed, he has somehow avoided being an insular academic. It is the injection of the baroque, the beautiful, the painful, the joyous and the emotional that saves Ritchie, the person, and Ritchie the artist, from the sterility and pomposity that I had anticipated.
To accomplish this, Ritchie relies on his encyclopedic knowledge of (and this is a short list) particle physics, high-level mathematics, Greek and Roman Classics, noir and neo-noir film, astrology, psychology, popular culture. comics, porn, religion, politics, biology and ecology. To say that Ritchie defies easy categorization is an understatement.
THE MORNING LINE
Perhaps the best example of the way in which Ritchie is able to equally engage MIT scientists and the man on the street is the artist’s large pavilion, The Morning Line, commissioned by Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna -- the foundation founded in 2002 by art patroness and collector, Francesca von Habsburg,
The Morning Line is a modular structure, the idea being that it can be infinitely reconfigured as each module, or “building block” is constructed according to an exact calculation drawn from fractal geometry that is a microcosm of the universe. To actually build the piece, Ritchie worked with his friends, the innovative architectural team made up of Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch -- also men of daunting intellect.
The ideas for the piece were constantly amended (and they are still in flux today). Ritchie worked closely with Ms. von Habsburg and her chief curator, Daniela Zyman. He absorbed ideas and suggestions from colleagues across many disciplines and pivoted mid-project expanding the original idea of a pure architectural outdoor installation adding vitality and interactivity to it with the inclusion of “sound art.” In its next iteration, he explains, he would like to expand that even further with the ability for input from visitors.
The structure. which was launched in Seville, Spain, has subsequently traveled to Istanbul, Turkey and is currently on view in the Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna, Austria.
One of the compelling things about the completed pavilion is that its lacy, black silhouette, open for visitors to wander its interior spaces or “rooms” -- now replete with projection screens and fitted with 52 sophisticated sound speakers -- is that it evokes wildly divergent reactions from its visitors. Those who see and spend time in the pavilion tend to find references based on their own culture, and in some cases see things in it that Ritchie himself never anticipated, an unforeseen result that delights the artist.
Ritchie tells me that when the pavilion stood in front of a monastery in Spain, many saw it as a Christian, or anti-Christian symbol, yet while it held pride of place in busy Eminou Square in Istanbul, many of the citizens of that city -- saw Arabic and Islamic references in its shapes and sounds.
This interaction is important to Ritchie, as he explains, “I love to take my work to places where a ‘void’ of some kind has developed, or decay, or a lack of dynamism and torpor has set in an urban setting. My hope is” he continues, “that my work will bring the people who live in that particular place to come and engage with the piece, the sound and music. The result, if I am successful is that it will in some way revitalize the place in which it is installed in a very specific way, only possible in that place and at that time”.
Ritchie’s desire for this type of reaction has thus far been realized. In fact, he tells me, after initial wariness from some of the government bureaucrats in the cities in which The Morning Line has been exhibited: “Every Mayor has actually asked to buy the work and keep it there when it was time to leave”.
“When something like that happens organically, I know I have succeeded to some degree in making a work of art that can be transformed from something that might initially be perceived as alien or intrusive to something that becomes not just tolerated, but accepted to the degree that it has become a part of the visual and cultural landscape of the city and the people don’t want it to leave”.
MAN OF MIT/MAN OF THE PEOPLE
Before I met Ritchie, I read a lot about him, and a lot of what has been written has been by the greatest scientific minds at universities across the world and by architects, urban planners, sound art composers and critics, all wholly immersed in the highest levels of discourse in their chosen disciplines.
Therefore, I came to the premature conclusion that although Ritchie might be able to excite those who “think” for a living, he might miss the mark with a more Populist audience. I was wrong.
Ritchie avoids intellectual and academic inaccessibility for several reasons, but one of the most important, in my view is that he is not just a scientist but a sensualist. He is not all about “systems”. He is also wallows in color, texture and sound. Throw in Ritchie’s genuine love of the dramatic, the absurd and a visceral enjoyment of life and people, and you are left with a artist who is a hybrid of -- to use crude shorthand -- Quentin Tarantino and Stephen Hawkins.
REFLECTIONS ON THE BEACH
After visiting with Ritchie in New York, my instincts about were confirmed when I attended a performance he gave on Venice Beach in California. Ritchie’s ridiculously dramatic, grandiose and yes, “unthinkable” performance, required that I, and other attendees, don high-fidelity earphones, a black cardboard mask, with cutouts mimicking Morning Line modules, and black plastic ponchos silkscreened in white with the constellations, as they would appear in the heavens at the precise time of the performance, .
Eerie yet beautiful music begins to pipe into my ears, (composed by Indie rocker, Bryce Dessner). As the music rises and falls, figures representing the moons and the sun and, yes, “the beginning of time” walk slowly across the expanse of sand co-starring in a spectacle headlined by the enormous orange ball of California sun descending towards the horizon.
As the music crescendos, Ritchie himself appears in the middle of the beach. Sporting a John Dillinger style gangster suit and skinny tie, with serious deliberation and barely concealing his glee, Ritchie begins to “shoot” a gun (fake) into a quartet of enormous, terrifying looking dummies that have been doused in gasoline, igniting them and creating a true fire and smoke storm.
As the effigies burn and the grey and black smoke begins to wisp and screen the view of the ocean and the exquisite Southern Californian sunset, Ritchie somewhat miraculously creates exactly what he intended: a palimpsest of sights, sounds and smells, evoking both creation and the dawn of time, while simultaneously heralding utter destruction and perhaps the end of time.
The performance has both those who know what is going on, and those who are just passers-by, rapt with attention and many seem stunned into a state of personal reverie.
This is no ivory tower academic, I think to myself, watching the spectacle, and I can’t wait to find out what is next in Mr. Ritchie’s bag of magic tricks and what intellectual and artistic pyrotechnics he will thrill us with next.
For an artist who takes no less than the concept of the cosmos as the starting point for his artistic exploration, and refers to his canon of work thus far as, “a constantly evolving drawing of my personal universe,” Matthew Ritchie’s studio in a nondescript building in the Garment district of midtown Manhattan seems, at first glance, wholly unassuming.
Ritchie welcomes me into a large rectangular sun-filled room -- orderly and extremely peaceful --especially considering the cacophony of New York noise and chaos just outside the building, Ritchie is alone, cradling a cup of steaming herbal tea, and apologizing for a confusion about our meeting time. The studio holds few clues to the workings of Ritchie’s ever-churning mind.
A boyish looking 47-year old British-born American transplant, Ritchie is surprisingly humble and lacking in arrogance. With a thatch of thick gray hair and a warm and open smile and style, the artist who is currently thriving in a mid-career. Garnering rave reviews and spawning a plethora of articles seeking to explain his work, Ritchie appears and behaves more like a nurturing English professor than an artistic genius.
There are drawings stacked neatly against walls, several uncluttered work tables with computers. A few sequined and feathered masks scattered on a counter that Ritchie explains he is designing for an upcoming performance of his latest show “Monstrance” in Venice Beach, California are the only clue towards Ritchie’s bent towards the theatrical.
THE INTIMIDATION FACTOR
For a man chosen in 2001 by Time Magazine as “one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought,” I was understandably intimidated by our first meeting, certain that my lack of scientific or mathematical knowledge would make me feel tongue-tied. Yet that initial intimidation is immediately wiped away by the artist’s eagerness to talk about his work, his patient explanations, and his lack of condescension. It occurs to me that Ritchie is used to meeting people who are not as smart as he is and the fact that humor and irony are a large part of what make Matthew Ritchie tick, makes him approachable . Coupled with this his voracious curiosity and obvious love of life and intellectual inquiry is infectious.
Ritchie’s “art”, an inadequate word to describe his multi-media output of drawings, paintings, large scale public pavilions, light installations and performances -- is based, he explains, on what he describes as “My journey to explore: ‘systems of knowledge’ -- those that already exist and those that I make up. Ritchie uses these systems, he says, “to create the personal ‘working model’ on which my visual language is based.I perpetually recombines these systems into a ‘super-positional state’ that both extends the space of painting and I attempt to recover meaning from the complexity and entropy of modern life. I work across multiple disciplines, applying this model to a specific “site”; which can be an idea, a place or a time”.
This theory-laden explanation, however, belies Ritchie’s equal fervor for a sense of fun in his work.
For example, in the midst of an explanation of how he came to the idea of using modular fractal geometry as a modular template for work exploring the elasticity (or lack thereof of the universe), he casually throws in the fact that his latest paintings, slated for his inaugural show in LA he has created a series of paintings based on “angels” and monsters”. “I have tried to evoke representations of ‘high energy states’ in the angel works which include as references, pole dancers, solar storms and female athletes, while my “monster” paintings are meant to reflect of ‘negative energy states.’ They are each devoted to a famous monster from a popular film,” he speeds up. “Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy and the Wolfman and are also address the negative energy theme with sources from surgery, terror attacks and video games to ecological disasters”.
After this litany, delivered with almost child-like enthusiasm, I come to the conclusion that although Ritchie is clearly the savant he has been anointed, he has somehow avoided being an insular academic. It is the injection of the baroque, the beautiful, the painful, the joyous and the emotional that saves Ritchie, the person, and Ritchie the artist, from the sterility and pomposity that I had anticipated.
To accomplish this, Ritchie relies on his encyclopedic knowledge of (and this is a short list) particle physics, high-level mathematics, Greek and Roman Classics, noir and neo-noir film, astrology, psychology, popular culture. comics, porn, religion, politics, biology and ecology. To say that Ritchie defies easy categorization is an understatement.
THE MORNING LINE
Perhaps the best example of the way in which Ritchie is able to equally engage MIT scientists and the man on the street is the artist’s large pavilion, The Morning Line, commissioned by Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna -- the foundation founded in 2002 by art patroness and collector, Francesca von Habsburg,
The Morning Line is a modular structure, the idea being that it can be infinitely reconfigured as each module, or “building block” is constructed according to an exact calculation drawn from fractal geometry that is a microcosm of the universe. To actually build the piece, Ritchie worked with his friends, the innovative architectural team made up of Benjamin Aranda and Christopher Lasch -- also men of daunting intellect.
The ideas for the piece were constantly amended (and they are still in flux today). Ritchie worked closely with Ms. von Habsburg and her chief curator, Daniela Zyman. He absorbed ideas and suggestions from colleagues across many disciplines and pivoted mid-project expanding the original idea of a pure architectural outdoor installation adding vitality and interactivity to it with the inclusion of “sound art.” In its next iteration, he explains, he would like to expand that even further with the ability for input from visitors.
The structure. which was launched in Seville, Spain, has subsequently traveled to Istanbul, Turkey and is currently on view in the Schwarzenbergplatz in Vienna, Austria.
One of the compelling things about the completed pavilion is that its lacy, black silhouette, open for visitors to wander its interior spaces or “rooms” -- now replete with projection screens and fitted with 52 sophisticated sound speakers -- is that it evokes wildly divergent reactions from its visitors. Those who see and spend time in the pavilion tend to find references based on their own culture, and in some cases see things in it that Ritchie himself never anticipated, an unforeseen result that delights the artist.
Ritchie tells me that when the pavilion stood in front of a monastery in Spain, many saw it as a Christian, or anti-Christian symbol, yet while it held pride of place in busy Eminou Square in Istanbul, many of the citizens of that city -- saw Arabic and Islamic references in its shapes and sounds.
This interaction is important to Ritchie, as he explains, “I love to take my work to places where a ‘void’ of some kind has developed, or decay, or a lack of dynamism and torpor has set in an urban setting. My hope is” he continues, “that my work will bring the people who live in that particular place to come and engage with the piece, the sound and music. The result, if I am successful is that it will in some way revitalize the place in which it is installed in a very specific way, only possible in that place and at that time”.
Ritchie’s desire for this type of reaction has thus far been realized. In fact, he tells me, after initial wariness from some of the government bureaucrats in the cities in which The Morning Line has been exhibited: “Every Mayor has actually asked to buy the work and keep it there when it was time to leave”.
“When something like that happens organically, I know I have succeeded to some degree in making a work of art that can be transformed from something that might initially be perceived as alien or intrusive to something that becomes not just tolerated, but accepted to the degree that it has become a part of the visual and cultural landscape of the city and the people don’t want it to leave”.
MAN OF MIT/MAN OF THE PEOPLE
Before I met Ritchie, I read a lot about him, and a lot of what has been written has been by the greatest scientific minds at universities across the world and by architects, urban planners, sound art composers and critics, all wholly immersed in the highest levels of discourse in their chosen disciplines.
Therefore, I came to the premature conclusion that although Ritchie might be able to excite those who “think” for a living, he might miss the mark with a more Populist audience. I was wrong.
Ritchie avoids intellectual and academic inaccessibility for several reasons, but one of the most important, in my view is that he is not just a scientist but a sensualist. He is not all about “systems”. He is also wallows in color, texture and sound. Throw in Ritchie’s genuine love of the dramatic, the absurd and a visceral enjoyment of life and people, and you are left with a artist who is a hybrid of -- to use crude shorthand -- Quentin Tarantino and Stephen Hawkins.
REFLECTIONS ON THE BEACH
After visiting with Ritchie in New York, my instincts about were confirmed when I attended a performance he gave on Venice Beach in California. Ritchie’s ridiculously dramatic, grandiose and yes, “unthinkable” performance, required that I, and other attendees, don high-fidelity earphones, a black cardboard mask, with cutouts mimicking Morning Line modules, and black plastic ponchos silkscreened in white with the constellations, as they would appear in the heavens at the precise time of the performance, .
Eerie yet beautiful music begins to pipe into my ears, (composed by Indie rocker, Bryce Dessner). As the music rises and falls, figures representing the moons and the sun and, yes, “the beginning of time” walk slowly across the expanse of sand co-starring in a spectacle headlined by the enormous orange ball of California sun descending towards the horizon.
As the music crescendos, Ritchie himself appears in the middle of the beach. Sporting a John Dillinger style gangster suit and skinny tie, with serious deliberation and barely concealing his glee, Ritchie begins to “shoot” a gun (fake) into a quartet of enormous, terrifying looking dummies that have been doused in gasoline, igniting them and creating a true fire and smoke storm.
As the effigies burn and the grey and black smoke begins to wisp and screen the view of the ocean and the exquisite Southern Californian sunset, Ritchie somewhat miraculously creates exactly what he intended: a palimpsest of sights, sounds and smells, evoking both creation and the dawn of time, while simultaneously heralding utter destruction and perhaps the end of time.
The performance has both those who know what is going on, and those who are just passers-by, rapt with attention and many seem stunned into a state of personal reverie.
This is no ivory tower academic, I think to myself, watching the spectacle, and I can’t wait to find out what is next in Mr. Ritchie’s bag of magic tricks and what intellectual and artistic pyrotechnics he will thrill us with next.
MATTHEW RITCHIE:
ARTIST STUDIO VISIT
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