Why The Hard Way Isn’t So Difficult

Melinda Rose Silva takes a look at how Matthew Ritchie's artwork might just save us all.

Cultural critic Marshal McLuhan famously wrote, “The medium is the message.” When it comes to the art of Matthew Ritchie, I can’t help but agree. Through his paintings, marker drawings, sculpture, fiction, and online projects, Ritchie brings together vast amounts of information to craft a compelling metanarrative that encompasses everything from the Big Bang to the end of time. Perhaps with such a large purview, it is not surprising that the New York Times named his work among the most difficult in contemporary art. However, Ritchie does not make difficult art for its own sake; rather he simply responds to the often overwhelming Information Age culture with both ingenuity and beauty.

Any introduction to Matthew Ritchie’s colorful, abstract works must begin with the grid. Just as Picasso utilized the grid to deconstruct and reorganize pictorial space, Ritchie synthesizes and organizes vast amounts of information—from alchemy, Judeo-Christian religion, and modern science—into a new system of knowledge. The seven-by-seven grid with colors on the y-axis and organic shapes on the x-axis, serves as a compass for his cosmology. The system articulates forty-nine characters or elements, each grouped into seven families. (Think: comic book chracters or Greek gods and you begin to understand the layers of meaning.) Each character simultaneously embodies a divine entity (often fallen angels), quantum or alchemical properties, emotional states or virtues (free will, ambiguity), and physical properties (ranging from continents to the lobes of the brain). Further, the colors are not coincidental, but rooted in Judeo-Christian color theory and symbolism. So while his paintings appear as colorful abstract forms interlaced with whimsical black marker strokes, the bold shapes and colors each signify a finite entity and reflect an interaction. Confused? Well, that’s fair and perhaps the point.

For example, in Autogenesis, 1996–1998, a series of fifty pencil and ink drawings on Mylar, Ritchie uses figural, abstract, and scientific notations to tell the story of the creation of tiem, from the Big Bang to the beginning of earth. In many ways, these drawings—reminiscent of William Blake’s nineteenth-century illustrations of Biblical subjects—articulate how each character embodies different forms of significance. Like Richie’s grid, Autogenesis exposes each single character’s manifold indenties. Further, upon reading The Hard Way—the text that accompanied the artist’s 1996 solo exhibitions at Gallerie Météo in Paris, Basilico Fine Arts in New York, and the Web site for ädaweb--the viewer/reader is invited to directly participate in this world through the process of reading and viewing the unfurling drama. Richie drives this message home on the Web project, when he asks the viewer to relate to a specific character.

In his Gamblers series, such characters as Lucifer (who also represents Free Will), Astoreth (Ambiguity) and Beelzebub (Growth) all meet in a non-descript hotel room in Boston to play a game of chance that will consummate the creation of the universe. Part of what makes the story so engaging is the human qualities that each figure assumes and the layers of meaning that can be read into the story. For example, Lucifer and Astoreth are in love, but Beelzebub also loves Astoreth. In other words, Free Will loves Ambiguity, but so does Growth. In the end, Free Will triumphs. Further since each character also symbolizes a quantum principle, one can read the relationships scientifically. In essence, Ritchie unites the poetics of the universe with the intrigues of the human heart. Just as the characters play a game of chance, so too does the viewer: one is given the rules of the game and asked to figure it out. Indeed, the stories are compelling as they articulate a drama with all the humor, pain, and struggle of a good play. Yet, to deconstruct each painting and its role in Richie’s evolving narrative, while a worthwhile pursuit, ignores the larger, overarching goal and importance of the series. It’s easy: just play the game.

As a twenty-first century artist, Ritchie is posing a critical and thoughtful look at the vast amount of information that surrounds and challenges modern living. The subtitle for The Hard Way series—Everything is Information—gives us a starting point. In an interview, Richie remarked that an average copy of the The New York Times includes more information than an individual in the Middle Ages would acquire in a lifetime. Indeed, the media generates and disseminates more forms of knowledge than ever before, and yet our post-modernist culture lacks a cohesive system for understanding and organizing all these forms of information. In fact, it seems that more often than not, all of this information disempowers and overwhelms more than it uplifts. The gradual assumption of science as the source of authority has not necessarily simplified our relationship with the universe. By stringing together his own version of how the universe was created and how it endures, Ritchie essentially offers this story as a completely new, valid form of knowledge. In an age in which everything is information, information becomes everything. In structuring the media, Richie gives us a message both playful and serious, simple and complex, easy and hard: human experience is itself meaningful. When Ritchie was asked what he wants viewers to get out of his art, he replied with refreshing candor: “That life really is that complicated.” It is and thank goodness. Let’s role the dice.