Abstract geometric painting with intersecting lines and gold accents, evoking hidden structure, logic, and symbolic mapping by Ritu Raj

Golden Plot

Medium: Mixed Media on Wood
Size: 2.5ft x 3ft
Creation Date: 2023
Collection: Out of Darkness

Golden Plot (2023) is a painting about hidden order — a layered exploration of narrative, logic, and abstraction disguised as design. Part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this 48 x 48 inch mixed media on canvas piece reads like a diagram of something you recognize but can’t quite name.

Grids, fractured lines, and modular blocks interlace over a muted surface of charcoal, sand, and ochre. Glints of gold slice through the geometry — not flashy, but quietly insistent — like emphasis marks in an otherwise coded map. This is not a golden age. It’s a golden question.

I made Golden Plot while reflecting on the role of narrative in abstraction. What if we construct meaning not from story, but from rhythm? From interruption? From placement? The painting isn’t about telling. It’s about arranging. And in that arrangement, something resembling plot appears — even if we’re not sure where it leads.

This work resonates with the conceptual rigor of Sol LeWitt, who used systems as creative engines rather than constraints. Like LeWitt, I’m fascinated by the tension between structure and spontaneity — how one invites the other.

Golden Plot doesn’t reveal its logic. It holds it. It suggests that even abstraction has an architecture, and that even maps without destinations have value.

As part of the Out of Darkness Collection, this piece reclaims precision as poetry — where gold doesn’t glitter, but guides.