Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection: Painting the Impermanence of Feeling

Ritu Raj’s Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection explores the fluidity of emotion and memory through bold abstraction. From twine-painted gestures to haunting color fields, these works capture the fleeting beauty of atmospheric states and human feeling in a poetic, painterly language of motion and depth.

Colored Fireballs, 6ft x 6ft, Ephemeral Atmosphere, 2023

In the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, contemporary abstract artist Ritu Raj delves into the elusive terrain of emotion, transience, and atmospheric resonance. Comprising paintings such as Delta Variant, Horizons as Possibility, Remains, Flight of Shadows, Plankton (Dark Ocean), Plankton (Sun Light Ocean), Swan Fight, and Mindful Craziness, the collection is unified by a tension between form and formlessness — between gesture and evaporation.

Painted largely between 2020 and 2025, the works span oil and acrylic mediums, utilizing tools as diverse as traditional brushes, twine, and even sculpted wood surfaces. This breadth of materiality contributes to the collection's central inquiry: How can abstraction reflect the impermanence of emotion and the atmosphere of an unspoken moment?

Raj’s Flight of Shadows exemplifies his signature “twine painting” method, where long cords of twine are dipped in oil and dragged across the canvas, translating bodily movement into sweeping arcs. The painting evokes movement and stillness in equal measure — a choreography of mark-making that echoes Lorna Simpson’s engagement with form as both presence and residue.

In Delta Variant and Horizons as Possibility, the painter responds to the global unease of 2020 with layered fields of muted greens and reds, splintered by shapes that hover and dissipate. These pieces reflect Raj’s interest in Mark Rothko’s emotive color fields and Helen Frankenthaler’s fluid staining techniques, yet they lean into chaos more than transcendence. The atmosphere is not meditative but charged — a suspended weather of inner turbulence.

As Agnes Martin once said, “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” This collection channels that ethos, offering a visual vocabulary for what is too fleeting to articulate and too personal to ignore.

Raj’s Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection is not a series of paintings to be solved, but to be felt. They invite the viewer into a space of slow looking — a space where memory dissolves into texture, where silence speaks in layers, and where abstraction becomes not a style, but a form of listening.

You can view the full Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection here.