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Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends (2021) is a memory unraveling in layers. Part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this 48 x 48 inch acrylic painting reflects on love, loss, and the echoes that linger long after presence has passed.

Painted in translucent layers and interrupted forms, the composition feels like a palimpsest — moments overwritten, erased, and bleeding through. Color washes of soft violet, pale pink, and spectral gray blend and blur, like the residue of intimacy fading from conscious memory.

The work does not mourn. It haunts. Its gestures are loose, almost accidental, as if each brushstroke is a flicker — a trace of something once vivid and now receding. Faces aren’t visible. But feelings are.

This painting finds resonance with the emotional abstractions of Tracey Emin, though less raw in confession. Like Emin, I’m less concerned with aesthetics and more with emotional imprint — how memory shapes perception, and how painting becomes a site of release.

The ghosts in Ghosts of ex-Girlfriends aren’t frightening. They’re familiar. Fleeting. Flecks of feeling that resurface when you’re not looking. The painting captures that sense of walking through a city and suddenly remembering a name, a scent, a fight. It’s intimate, but shared.

As part of the Ephemeral Atmosphere Collection, this work embraces impermanence — using abstraction to explore memory as texture, tone, and space.

Ritu Raj | Contemporary Abstract Painter | Phoenix

Ritu Raj is a contemporary abstract painter based in Phoenix, Arizona, working mostly at scale — canvases of five to eight feet. His practice runs in two bodies: Abstract Inquiry, in oil and acrylic, and Organic Movement, which replaces the brush with thread, using gravity and viscosity as compositional instruments. More than 260 works, collected across the US, Europe and Asia. He is the author of the forthcoming The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self.

https://www.rituart.com/
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