The case · the framework itself lives at artgraph.co
ArtGraph
Why ArtGraph exists
Abstract painting has no language of its own. That single fact is why finding it has always depended on someone else's translation — and why a language it could be searched by had to be built from scratch.
Not curation. Encounter. · The framework, in full, at artgraph.co
Six dimensions read the painting. Three read the encounter. Every dimension, every reading and every correction is published at the Taxonomy of Abstraction — including the readings it got wrong.
How do you give language to something that inherently has none?
That's the problem at the center of abstract art — and the reason every existing system for finding it fails. Galleries curate for convincing, not for encounter. Search engines categorize by style, as if a painting were a product on a shelf. Platforms optimize for inventory, not for the person standing in front of something that won't let them go.
I bought a painting once, walking through a small street shop in Udaipur. No gallery, no lighting, no one explaining why I should want it. I was simply compelled. That painting is still in the tube I carried it home in — because the infrastructure to place it correctly in my life doesn't exist.
Abstract paintings have a 1-to-1 relationship with the viewer. Not a demographic. Not a taste profile. One painting, one person, one encounter that can't be manufactured.
ArtGraph was built to make that match possible. Six dimensions read the painting. Three read the encounter — the space it will live in, the transformation you want that space to undergo, and the feeling you're reaching for. And beneath it all, sentiment: how it makes you feel, mapped against how it has moved others.
The Taxonomy of Abstraction
A six-dimension scoring framework — Texture, Form, Color Range, Palette, Contrast, and the Abstraction Quotient. The first formal language for what an abstract painting is doing beneath the surface. Applied to a catalog of 266 works across six collections, and published in full with its corrections at artgraph.co.
The Abstraction Engine
A live conversational AI that reads three further dimensions — the space a painting will live in, the transformation you want that space to undergo, and the feeling you're reaching for — and translates them into a specific painting. The proof of concept. The Discover Weekly of abstract art — built on ArtGraph the way Spotify built Discover Weekly on the Audio Graph.
The Book
ArtGraph — A Language for Abstract Art, and a Way to Find Yours
Manuscript complete at 193 pages. In conversation with publishers.
Two companion volumes are in production with American Real Publishing: The Shape of Seeing, on the genesis of abstraction, and The Unalgorithmic Self, on preserving the human soul in the age of AI.
The Vision
ArtGraph as licensable infrastructure for Christie's, Sotheby's, Artsy — the translation layer between a person's life and a painting that those platforms have never had.
A founding engineer of Facebook used the Abstraction Engine — a 12-minute conversation about his life in Venice Beach. He found his painting. He began sharing it with his network. Two independent love signals in 22 minutes.
Why every existing system fails
Spotify built the Audio Graph — a proprietary dimensional map of music. From it came Discover Weekly: the most precise recommendation engine in cultural history. Spotify didn't just organize music. It gave music a language it could be searched by. ArtGraph is built on the same principle.
But there is a difference worth naming. Spotify organized what music already knew about itself — tempo, key, time signature, genre. The Audio Graph made existing vocabulary computable. What the Taxonomy of Abstraction had to do is harder: invent the language from scratch, for a medium that has none.
The dating site parallel — and where it ends
Dating platforms are the closest human model for 1-to-1 dimensional matching where the match is deeply personal and consequential. They solved that problem at scale. But both sides of that match have language. A person can describe themselves. The other entity can do the same.
Abstract painting cannot speak. It has no representational anchor — no face, no place, no story you can name before you've felt it. A portrait tells you who. A landscape tells you where. Abstract painting tells you nothing, on purpose. That is its power. That is also why every existing system for finding it fails.
What a system can do that a person cannot
Curators write wall texts. Art advisors make recommendations. Gallerists give a work its context and its argument. This is skilled translation, and no system replaces it — a language is not a substitute for someone who has stood in front of the work and can tell you what they saw.
But a person can only be in one room at a time, holding one wall. What ArtGraph adds is reach: a way for a painting to be found by someone who was never going to walk into that room, described in terms specific enough that the encounter still happens. The Taxonomy knows the dimensions — six for the painting, three for the encounter — and which work scores closest to what someone is actually reaching for. It hands that person to a gallery better prepared than they would otherwise have arrived.
A framework that can be wrong
The claim is testable, which is unusual for anything written about abstraction. One of the six dimensions was retired in August 2026 after it was measured against the whole catalog and found to be tracking something another dimension already recorded. Every painting has also been read a second time, blind, and both readings are published side by side — including the one place they systematically disagree. The analysis is public.
A 266-painting catalog. A conversational AI. Your life, your space, your painting.
Find your painting →Every dimension, every reading, the corrections, and thirty-five paintings by other hands read the same way.
artgraph.co →Press, publishers, collectors, collaborators, investors. I'd welcome a conversation.
ritu@rituart.com →Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona. He maintains a catalog of 266 original paintings across six collections — and built ArtGraph because no infrastructure existed to help people find the right one.
This is not a second career. Same person, same instinct, same way of relating to the world: find the structure underneath a thing, then build the abstraction that lets other people use it. That instinct built companies before it built a language, and it is running in the studio now.
Each replaced something concrete with an abstraction of itself — computing without the computer, a ride without the fleet, boarding rebuilt as hospitality, a diamond without the mine. Each became a category the world then adopted, which is the harder half of any invention, and the reason to think a new language for abstraction might travel too.
Painting is a return to heritage. He grew up in New Delhi as the son of K.B. Goel, one of India's preeminent art critics — a man who championed the generation that defined modern Indian art. Souza, Husain, Swaminathan were not names in a textbook. They were the people in the room. ArtGraph carries that inheritance forward: the belief that abstract art has always deserved a language precise enough to find the person it belongs to.