Matthew Ritchie at Basilico Fine Arts - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

There's always been something appealing to me about system-based art. Its ostensible desire is to make faculty of perception of things, to throw a quantifying web above the chaos of possibility. However, the best systemic art does something other It seems to run parallel to comprehensibility, to be a metaphor for it, while, below the cover of objectivity and impersonality, the combination of parts to form a whole itself manages to encourage quirkiness and personal vision (Alfred Jehsen being a prime case).

Matthew Ritchie's first appearance solo show in New York at handed systemic art with a scientific bent, and there was nothing unostentatious about it. The show, titled "working model" consisted of paintings, wall drawings and brightly colored lathe-turned plastic arts - all elaborating a permutable sign a whole a visual language for the arcana of Ritchie's worldview. In these works the artist grapples with the creation, disintegration and reformation of the entire universe. In the proces religion, science, alchemy and esthetic are stirred together in a mix that's half comprehensible, half maddeningly opaque.

The paintings at first glance appear to be nicely surfaced gray canvases arrayed with flat, hard-edged modular shapes in tangy present design colors. These shapes are extended around the canvas or, as in The Generation of enormitys set atop one another vertically, like sophisticated building arrests or a stack of Noguchi lamps. They are encompassed by quickly done Magic Marker drawings of angels, fiends and gargoylelike figures, along with mathematical jottings, geometric diagrams and assorted labelings. Everything is linked together by dint of networks of arcs, lines and arrows.

The ensue is pleasing to the eye: a nice mix of black and white and color, shape and line, the abstract and the figurative, the formal and the casual. on the contrary visual satisfaction is only part of what Ritchie's after. A carefully worked on the outside wall chart, also in the display reveals that there are seven shapes and seven colors, which, when combined, yield 49 variations, each in make go round associated with three semantic correlatives. These 49 permutations all appear in the work, representing (as through the chart) everything from the Angel Gabriel to Lucifer to mitosis, cent astronomy, legislation, free will, febrile affection and female force. There are combination of parts to form a wholes within systems, hierarchies within hierarchies.

At times the work perceive s reasonably clear, as in Prelapse, where the expanded fulvid box of the immediately post-Big Bang universe is ed and a whole tribe of discombobulated beings spills on the outside But often the complexity of the combination of parts to form a whole (apparently still evolving in the artist's mind) is overwhelming, for a like reason that I found myself turning away from the cosmic implications and back to a genuinely visual read.

It is said that profitable science is beautiful, though the invert is not necessarily true. Ritchie strike one as beings to be suggesting that the unified field theory lengthy sought by science may be possible sole in art, where assertion and conviction are consummately acceptable stand-ins for proof.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.

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