How would God, if he was an artist and a scientist, see our universe from beginning to end in fast-forward? We may discover the artistic/scientific answer to that question in Matthew Ritchie’s multimedia works. The objects he creates are monumental and extremely exciting.

Ritchie started to think about the universe and its possible artistic representation in the 1990s by merging physics, art, mythology, philosophy, religion and history. His starting point was that science is the new art, as well as the new religion, creating multiple parallel mythologies and theories of creation, or cosmogonies. Ritchie creates a spectacular visual world guiding us through the stories of the beginning and the end.

Left: 1. Matthew Ritchie, Monster of the East (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74” x 56”. Monstrance, 2011, L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles. artes fine arts magazine

He said about the beginning, “Since it is almost impossible to understand them as they were then; as infinite points, bound in an indecomposable continuum, let’s look at them as they would become. They were so many and they had waited for so long. Their bodies interleaved as closely as pages in a book, they slipped and slid in and out of each other, all through the endless day of the beginning, inside the heart of naked singularity. It was before years, before history, before time: it was the whole universe; the birth; the hope; the blame; the dream; the betrayal; the revenge: all waiting inside one tiny, hot little dot.”

Ritchie thinks that the world is at its worst at the beginning and the end. In his apocalyptic video projections, like Augur (L & M Art, 2011) we see the sun from the deepness of the murky water, then closer to the surface a single cell outline and later, creatures emerge from the water and starting to move. Then tremendous winds whip over the landscape, fires burn living things into metal sculptural skeletons, while a huge wire ball—an atomic model of some chemical—rolls over everything. In this vision, the world remains, but without humans—a very sad conclusion. But this unpopulated world doesn’t ‘feel’ sad watching, while listening to the music of Bryce Dessner, with Shara Worden’s vocals: sounding sometimes ethereal; sometimes beautifully-baroque; sometimes merely a noisy, cacophonic composition that could be the sound of parallel universes. Ritchie makes the viewer think about all the possible complexities of life: physical, biological and socio-ecological.

Ritchie started his career in London as a painter, with drawing as his base. But, after moving to New York,he expanded his work to include sculptures, digital images, light boxes, musical compositions, creative writing and structures that function as architecture. In 1995, in an interview with Owen Drolet, Ritchie described his Working Model. It consists of seven vertical and horizontal rows that include physics equations, colours, characters, emotions and/or typically human characteristics and physical properties of the universe. The equations line the top and the colors are listed vertically. Each shape can correspond to each color, which in turn can represent seven different groupings of three: character, emotion/human characteristics, and physical property. This matrix gives the artist 49 possible different combinations that he calls a map. The paintings of The Hard Way (1996) were among the first to use this map to create a mythological struggle of gods, fighting over the creation of Earth.

Ritchie stated that he wanted to break away from linear storytelling and create a more structured and formulaic narrative, a scientifically correct mythology as a base for his complex visual stories. He knows physics very well. In 2009, he was the only artist invited to speak to an audience of Nobel laureates discussing Einstein’s theories and how they can be applied in the 21th century. According to the laws of physics we only recognize one reality and it can be predicted. Edward Lorenz’s “Butterfly effect” that the “flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas” made chaos theory popular, bringing the idea of randomness into science. The Morning Line, among others, is an excellent example of how Ritchie transforms his scientific ideas into art.

The Morning Line, a sonic, Gothic-like temple is an imposing 10 meters high and 20 meters long, built of 20 tons of black coated aluminum, intended to draw in the expanding universe that surrounds us. Ritchie started it all with black and white drawings that evolved into something really large (The Shapes of Space, Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2004). The Universal Cell and Remote Viewing (2006) was the next step into a truly three dimensional structure. Ritchie collected all possible data about the human cell—the sacred unit of our measurement on the human scale. He recognized that everything was designed around this geometrical pattern. He saw a similarity between ‘imprisonment’ in our own genetic make-up and actual prison cell design. He made several different drawings of all these things, then layered the semi-transparent papers, one on top of the other, until they created a kind of information tunnel. In the end, he scanned them into the computer and created the final image, which he sent to a metal-shop to be cut out and assembled. The final product is an amazing structure which captures not only the dimensions of space, but its moving energies, as well. Ritchie’s artistic goal was no less ambitious than to represent the entire universe, as well as our beliefs and knowledge about it. Ritchie’s approach is philosophical, involving religion, occult practices and scientific principles. As he said in an interview, he wants to “describe the whole spectrum of experience, simultaneously.”

The idea in The Morning Line is “drawing in space” and to make the drawing stand in space and become a part of the universe. Ritchie involved design innovators Aranda/Lash, the Music Research Centre of York University and Arup AGU to create a fully programmable three-dimensional sculpture, which is also moveable. From his drawings, they designed a structure in which each part can be replicated at a smaller and smaller scale, until it reaches the size of a nano-spectrum,and from that starting point, you can build anything. Ritchie called it a quantum building, because one piece (tetrahedra) can support 22 other smaller ones, and so on, toward infinity. With this method you can “build a cathedral which involves the universe.”

The structure of The Morning Line is amazing! Standing in it is a once-in-a-lifetime artistic experience. You can see the sky, but what you are really looking at is the metal curves drawn on the sky. There is a glass wall as part of the structure and on it, images of the universe and apocalyptic videos are projected. You hear stories, told by various voices, about different situations, and above all is the music: classical music pieces mixed with sounds, created by the structure itself, or composed by contemporary musicians inspired by the sculpture and improvised, on-site. The Morning Line is also sensitive to time, street noise, you and the other visitors; so you can never have the same light and sound experience twice. It is a complex, amazing and really universal experience. It has been installed in three very specific sites: Center for Contemporary Art, Seville (2008); Eminönü Square, Istanbul (2010); Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna (2011).

While The Morning Line tries to reconstruct the universe in a physical way, Monstrance, Ritchie’s recently-closed show at L & M Art in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, returns to mythological interpretation. Monstrance—meaning show in Latin—is a medieval-period ritual vessel used in the public display of relics. In the performance at the opening, a masked singer represented the many forms of sun, including the setting sun. The show also dealt with one of Hollywood’s own myths: The Fallen Star. Upon entering the gallery, there were eight paintings of golden angels. These hybrids of feathered humans and gaseous nebula represented “high energy states” such as solar storms, pole dancers and female athletes. The figures were accompanied by dots showing the position of constellations over Los Angeles on the opening day, November 2nd, 2011, The Feast of All Souls. The lone sculpture in the gallery could be the figure of a fallen angel, or, more likely, what was left of him after falling from the sky. Stepping to the east gallery, it was a very different world, more like a dark, subterranean cave at the beginning of time. There were water pools projected onto the floor and their reflections on the walls. Prehistoric drawings covered the ground, interrupted by meteorite-like sculptures, while images floated and music played. There were also four paintings of monsters in this gallery: and their dots showed the position of constellations on October 31st, Halloween. They represented “negative energy states” such as terror attacks, ecological disasters, surgery and video games. In this show Ritchie combined all his previous artistic elements: drawing, painting, sculpture, video projection, sound effect and performance, to create a meaningful and complex site-specific view of the gallery and its place in the universe.

Ritchie participated in two performances as stage designer. In the summer of 2009, Hypermusic Prologue, A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, debuted in Paris; then was performed again in 2010, at the Guggenheim in New York. The other was The Long Count, a 70-minute multimedia piece (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival [2009]; Holland Festival [2010]; Barbican Art Centre, London, [2012]). Ritchie set the scene by projecting an apocalyptical video on three giant screens that enveloped the musicians on stage. These hallucinatory videos showed whole trees uprooted and other “mad tales of creation and resurrection.”

Ritchie said that, in the work of painters like David Salle and Julian Schnabel, he saw the last of the generation of artists who had to follow “the master narrative of the west.” For him, that meant a new artistic era had begun, thereby freeing him to start his own quest into the Universe.

By Emese Krunák-Hajagos, Contributing Writer

Emese is an art critic and on-line publisher living in Toronto, Canada. Read more of her views at www.artoronto.ca

Matthew Ritchie, Monstrance, L & M Art, Los Angeles, Venice Beach, November 2- June 1, 2012

The Morning Line, Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna, Austria, Organized by Thyssen-Bornemissza Art Contemporary, June 7- November 20, 2011

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End Notes:

1. Matthew Ritchie, Monster of the East (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74” x 56”. Monstrance, 2011, L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

2. Matthew Ritchie, Matinal (2011), video. Animation Duration: 16:50; Animation: Nick Roth; Editing: James Case; Music: ‘Augur,’ by Aaron & Bryce Dessner. Exhibited: Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, 2011.

3. Matthew Ritchie, Hard Way, Day 3, 1996 (detail), 1996, enamel on sintra, 114”x165”x90”. Courtesy Basilico Fine Arts, New York.

4. Matthew Ritchie, The Universal Cell (2004), powder coated aluminum, stainless steel, gypsum, 11’x 12’ 6”x 12’ 6” (installation view from : Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, June 2 – September, 2005). Photo by Rob Kassabian. ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York RM Whitney 2005 Remote Viewing Installation.

5. Matthew Ritchie, with Aranda\ Lasch Arup AGU, The Morning Line (2008-2009). Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Installation view: Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna June 7 – November 20, 2011. Photo by Jakob Polacsek

6. Matthew Ritchie, with Aranda\ Lasch Arup AGU, The Morning Line (2008-2009). Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Installation view: Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna June 7 – November 20, 2011. Photo by Jakob Polacsek

7. Matthew Ritchie, Monstrance (2011), projected multi-channel, film vinyl and animation. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles, CA.

8. Matthew Ritchie, with Aaron and Bryce Dessner, The Long Count, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, New York, October 28 – 31, 2009. ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

9. Above, right: Matthew Ritchie, The Hour of the Apple (2011), oil and ink on linen, 74”x 56”. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.

10. Left: Matthew Ritchie, The Unconquered Sun (2011), aluminum structural units, epoxy coating, steel, sintered polyamid and enamel 135 ½ x 60” (overall). Photo: Joshua White. L&M Arts, Los Angeles, November 2, 2011-January 14, 2012 ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.