Matthew Ritchie’s Universal Quest

“Then, a tremendous wind whips 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.”

Matthew Ritchie with Aranda Lasch Arup AGU, The Morning Line, Vienna, 2011-2012. Photo Credit: Jakob Polacsek

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 and prison cells. He recognized that everything was designed around a geometrical pattern. He saw a similarity between our imprisonment in our genetic make-up and real prisons. He made several different drawings of all these things and then layered the semi-transparent papers on top of each 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.

Matthew Ritchie, Line Shot, 2009.  ©Matthew Ritchie, Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

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 there on you can build anything. Ritchie called it a quantum building, because one piece (tetrahedra) can support 22 other smaller ones and so on until 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 are 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 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, the street noise, you and the other visitors; so you can never have the same light and sound effect 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.

Ritchie participated in two performances as a 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 (Brooklyn Academy of Music, Next Wave Festival, 2009, Holland Festival, 2010, Barbican Art Centre, London, 2012), a 70-minute multimedia piece. 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.

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 ritual vessel in the medieval period for 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 was also about one of Hollywood’s myths: The Fallen Star. 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 into the east gallery was like stepping into a different world, a dark one, more like a subterranean cave at the beginning of time. There were water pools projected on 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, creating a meaningful and complex view of the specific site of the gallery and its place in the universe.

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 and he was free to go off and start his own quest into the Universe.

Matthew Ritchie, Monster of the East, 2011. Oil and ink on linen, 74 x 56 in. ©Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of L&M Arts, Los Angeles.