"Rather than depicting and defining specifics - events, places, ideas - my new works pose questions, to both the viewer and myself. For each of us there is a different understanding and process of resolving, and these processes can change through time depending on shifting circumstances. The title ‘Voices’ refers to the internal conversations that are triggered by the works, the questions and the resolution of each”. (1)

Ross Ritchie’s latest work deconstructs a personal space and constructs it again with McCahon-esque planes, a ‘Germanic’ colour palette, and meticulously rendered vessels that are very beautiful while being full of the prospect of torment.

The references in this collection of works are less of a montage and are more metonymous than in much of the previous work. Ritchie is looking inward and outward with elements from the inner sanctum of the artists studio space and the borrowed space that looks like the hills in the Thorndon area of Wellington. In Silence, the aerial perspective and depiction of time of day work with the ‘is it there or isn’t it’ skull on the hills to create a psychological thriller.

The vessels in this body of work, like the skull, are invested with the suffocating qualities of mental unease. But there is such restraint and control in the paint application and the formal structure of the work, that painted objects, shapes, tones and themes become fixed to a grid-like order. The psychic quality in the works has a timeless application.

Ritchie’s oeuvre puts the viewer (and the artist) at a calculated and distanced remove despite the split-hair detail of parts of the works. It is the richness of textural contrast mixed with a formal geometry that contributes to a sense of dislocation and an overtly implicit description of specious yet specific space. It is Ritchie’s preference that his symbols, marks, shapes and other elements not be read piecemeal but that they be taken in as constituent parts of the body of work.

(1) Ross Ritchie artist statement 2004