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Circle Barbed Wire (2023) is a painting about protection and pain — and how the two often intertwine. Part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, this 48 x 48 inch mixed media work brings together the visual elegance of symmetry with the sharpness of emotional boundaries.

The focal point is a loop — a circle that could be a crown, a fence, or a halo. But it’s not soft. It’s wrapped in barbed textures, etched and pulled into the surface like a memory that resists erasure. Around it, washes of steel blue, off-white, and rust echo the tension between beauty and harm.

I created Circle Barbed Wire while thinking about the emotional architecture we build — how we create shapes to guard our softness, and how those shapes often hurt. The circle, traditionally a symbol of wholeness, becomes a barrier here. Complete, but untouchable.

This piece aligns with the spirit of Louise Bourgeois, whose forms are both delicate and dangerous — holding trauma in tactile, intimate materials. Like Bourgeois, I’m drawn to contradictions: comfort and threat, roundness and rupture.

The painting isn’t about violence. It’s about resilience. About what it takes to hold space for oneself when the world feels sharp.

As part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, Circle Barbed Wire stands as both shield and offering — a visual mantra for boundaries that protect, even when they leave a mark.

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 also the author of ArtGraph, a language for abstract art: six dimensions that read the painting, three that read the encounter, a notation, and a catalog scored against all of them. The paintings are at rituart.com. The language is at artgra.ph.

The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self are forthcoming.

Art that listens.

https://www.rituart.com/
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