Matthew Ritchie Interview

by Owen Drolet

Owen Drolet: You have essentially created an entire, self sufficient language of symbols. Explain the components or alphabet that makes up this language.

Matthew Ritchie: The symbolic language that I use is intended to operate both independently as a pure form in itself and as a bridge between various pre-existing symbolic vocabularies. It is both an independent system and a model of models. The system evolved as a way to describe the internal architecture of making paintings. In the same way that a computer's internal progamming reflects the mind of the maker, so art reflects the perceptual architecture of the mind. I was hoping to create a primitive universal language that would allow symbolic translation of that architecture. On the way there I found myself drawn back to the question of origins, and consequently I had to first build a model of the kind of universe where such a language could even be contemplated. The alphabet of the system is very simple to start with and like most languages increases in compexity as the various components are combined with each other.

The system works like this: There are forty nine elements, divided into seven groups of seven. The seven groupings describe seven separate areas of operation in the system. Each element can appear in seven different ways depending on the context it is used in. Although the number of combinations is probably infinite, that is not the point, this is not a numerological system. The forty nine elements are characters, with precisely defined functions in the story that is told by their interaction. This is the story of origins, of genesis and fall, as a metaphor for the construction of art.

OD: Why have you chosen painting as your medium?

MR: Although I also use sculptures and wall drawings, I use painting as the primary form for a number of reasons. It is the most flexible form in its initial conditions, offering at least theoretically, no limit on possible action. If you can think of it, it can be displayed in the painting. Doing it is up to you. It is also the oldest recorded form and as such has the richest history. It is the form with the least external preconditions for existence, requiring no elaborate practices to sustain it. Finally, I think it is the form that most closely resembles the internal operations of the mind, in its conjunction of the fantastic and the mundane suspended in an organic delirium .

OD: I see your work as part of a trend in painting, of the last twenty five years or so, towards the cartographic. Obviously, you employ scientific diagrams in your work, but is this simply a means to an end, or does the cartographic and diagrammatic hold a specific meaning for you as a form of representation?

MR: Mapping is always an intrinsic element of any kind of visual representation and the borderlands betweeen external cartography, and the representation of internal states as a mapped enviroment are a shadowy area. A map always reflects the intentions and biases of its is fabricators. The visualisation systems from science and alchemy that I work with were evolved specifically to deal with hypothetical states of mind. They were and remain, works of the imagination. A mathematical description of a Riemann surface is just as much cartography of the mind as my own work. So rather than holding special meaning, I see no useful distinction between types of mapping, save for their ultimate function

OD: Who have been your influences within the visual arts? I have always imagined an amalgam of classic conceptualism and early eighties work.

MR: I was classically trained, which always sets up a series of contradictions when you move out of the past into the present. Minimalism has been a tremendous influence, in that it provided the conceptual framework for everything that followed. It prepared the ground for all of the eighties artists that were getting exposure when I was in college.

OD: Why did you decide to make the sculptures, to realize the form, as it were, of entropy etc.?

MR: The sculptures were made specifically to allow direct access to the work with absolutely no knowledge of the system. They represent both the simple side of the alphabet, in that they are friendly, almost childlike forms,and the purest, most iconic side, in that they represent the summation of the entire system.

OD: I know you often paint over the works you are not happy with. What is your criteria for a finished and successful painting?

MR: It's out the door.

OD: For your show at Basilico Fine Arts, the works describe one large story, a sort of composite and convolution of the major western creation myths of the last few thousand years. What is it specifically about these western narratives that interests you? What about the East?

MR: I am a child of the West. I grew up in the world created by its fevered dreams of lost utopias and worldly corruption. Even the most cursory examination of the institutions that manage and orient the western economies reveals that their roots are inextricably tied to the symbolic architecture of the past three thousand years. We are still carrying on a conversation about the freedom of the individual and the rights of the state that began in Athens two and a half thousand years ago. We are still trying to reconcile the material world with a concept of internal perfection that began in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. We are still trying to believe in the model of a rational and anthropomorphic universe that was fused from those two ideas in Northern Europe three hundered years ago.

Coming from England, the now bankrupt primary location of this discussion in the last century, I grew up seeing the price that this discussion exacts when played out in the real world. I have no such familarity with contemporary eastern societies, although it is increasingly clear that cultures I would have thought, perhaps wrongly, as more reconciled to concepts of circularity are becoming corrupted by the western dream of teleological perfectability.

OD: You also write. What is the relationship, if any, between your writing and the painting?

MR: Almost none. Obviously, I use the writing to investigate the things that interest me in other artists' work. But it is more a matter of seeing their work through my cloudy lens than incorporating their work into my system.

OD: Now that we have discussed the specifics, what is your work ultimately about? What is the conclusion you expect the viewer to draw from this literally twisted tale?

MR: Life is as complicated as it appears.