Old Reviews - Matthew Ritchie's "Universal Adversary" at Andrea Rosen

There's more posts on the way but in the meantime I'm going to post a few old reviews here. These are things that I've had published a while but aren't on-line. Here they are.

Elwyn Palmerton
Matthew Ritchie's Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery
Matthew Ritchie's recent show "Universal Adversary" began with a lightbox mounted outside the gallery featuring a quotation from Ezekiel: "their appearance and their work was as if a wheel within a wheel" it began and then continued "their rings full of eyes, round about them as four". The quote aptly evoked Ritchie's visual style and cosmological inter-disciplinary approach to art-making in addition to establishing his installation's quasi-religious tone of apocalyptic foreboding. Inside the gallery, the combination of a row of prismatic light-boxes (in which the images of ascending figures changed and dissolved depending upon your viewing angle), his swirling Arabesque latticework ("drawing" as architectural intervention), and the muted Earthy tones of the paintings created a cathedral-esque vibe – a tone amplified by an audio recording of a monotonous voice - the titular "Universal Adversary", presumably - intoning a litany of disaster scenarios that sounded as bureaucratic as it was ominous; the exhibition's title was lifted from a government report listing 15 threats to the U.S. population.

The overall effect was relatively tranquil, almost meditative – ironically so, considering his sprawling, chaotic aesthetic and paranoiac narrative – perhaps a reflection of how comfortable we are with the media's near daily hysterical pronouncements. In this sense, Ritchie's take on this sort of trendy religious/apocalyptic content was one of the more nuanced, lucid, and original interpolations of this recently popular theme.

The paintings, for their part, still feel like they contain the essential juice of his enterprise. This time around they're more painterly but they still contain his familiar diagrammatic flourishes – e.g. directional arrows, equations, and black outlines – as if his language will always remain an uncomfortable hybrid of contradictory devices - stuck somewhere between the picturesque and the schematic. The four shown here were redundant enough to suggest a series of stills rather than effectively independent paintings. His framing methods also, by focusing more on scale and density of information than on composition, accentuate the cinematographic as well as cosmological impulse in his work – as if he's alternately zooming in and out on a single, infinitely large and detailed, entity.

Given this tendency, one might expect more from the videos: two pixilated/grainy animations depicting atmospheric beachscapes or marshlands in mostly sepia and brown tones. Video ought to provide Ritchie with room to explore and reveal more of his inherently kinetic world but, unfortunately, he only manages to animate it. In a way, they're less cinematic or dynamic than the paintings; they're flurries of visual noise over static backgrounds – essentially an animation cliché: moving figures over a stationary ground.

Still, Ritchie's rigorously conceived world always elicits a combination of perplexity and wonderment – even when he fails to reveal enough of it. That he's flirting with its destruction is a tantalizing, amusingly ironic, and seemingly inevitable prospect, but the results felt timid: an atmospheric evocation of impending doom, an ambiance of paranoia, and the calm before the storm rather that the cataclysmic shit-storm that Ritchie's obviously capable of conjuring up. I guess we'll have to wait to see what comes next.