Electric Bloom on Obsidian: A Luminous Dialogue Between Motion and Stillness
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Size: 5ft x 5ft
Creation Date: 2025
Collection: Organic Movement
In Electric Bloom on Obsidian, Ritu Raj orchestrates a meeting between elemental forces—light and shadow, movement and pause—on a grand 5x5 ft oil on canvas stage. Part of the Organic Movement Collection, the piece radiates a kinetic bloom of golden-yellow and white gestures, emerging from the deep earthen umber like a flare in the night. The work’s layered transparency and dynamic striations create a visual rhythm that invites both still contemplation and visceral response.
This painting extends the artist’s signature string-painting technique, where each stroke records both physical gesture and meditative intent. In doing so, Raj’s process echoes the textural explorations of contemporary artists such as Zao Wou-Ki, who bridged lyrical abstraction with atmospheric landscapes, and Hiroshi Senju, whose cascading waterfalls seem to hover between movement and stillness. The sense of suspended energy in Electric Bloom on Obsidian also recalls Anselm Kiefer’s interplay of materiality and light, though Raj’s palette here embraces a more luminous, optimistic register.
The Organic Movement Collection embraces natural rhythms, translating the invisible patterns of growth, erosion, and bloom into tactile form. In this work, the yellow arc feels almost botanical, an unfolding petal captured mid-surge, while the darker backdrop anchors the composition in grounded stillness. The faint drips of paint—allowed to flow freely—become a reminder of gravity’s pull, of time passing even in moments of apparent suspension.
Collectors drawn to large-scale abstraction will find Electric Bloom on Obsidian a piece that transforms a space both physically and emotionally. Its scale invites the viewer to step close, tracing each textural shift, or to stand back and let the bloom’s full radiance expand into the room. In either case, the painting rewards repeated viewing, revealing subtle variations in tone and directionality with each encounter.
In the context of contemporary abstraction, Electric Bloom on Obsidian holds its own as both a personal meditation and a spatial event—an electric moment of organic life, frozen yet forever moving in the viewer’s eye.
