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Frosted Red SELF (2026) is the third painting on one six-foot canvas. Underneath it is Circuit Board of SELF, and underneath that, Abstraction (2023). Nothing was scraped away. Each painting was made over the one before.

I mixed a red very thin, diluted with Liquin, and brushed it across the whole of Circuit Board. I expected the layers below to glow through. They didn't. The red went opaque and closed the painting like a curtain.

On the second day I pressed painter's tape into the still-wet surface and lifted it away, hoping to let something through. A little came. Not enough.

On the third day the lower layers were still buried. There was a can of spray varnish lying close by, and I tried it on one small corner. It broke the thin skin of red and Liquin, and the surface began to crackle.

The next morning, the whole painting had frosted.

Now the circuit survives only as something seen through ice. A blue edge at the lip of a crack. A seam of gold, a seam of silver, catching the light. The violet block still holding its shape under the veil. The earlier painting no longer presents itself; you have to look for it.

Somewhere in those four days a very geometric painting moved to another level of abstraction. I did not so much make it as allow it.

Its ArtGram is a Quatrefoil. Texture, form, abstraction and palette reach to the edge, while color range and contrast hold back, everything gathered into one red. Two pairs, balanced across the center.

FArt that listens.

Medium: Oil over Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 6ft × 6ft
Creation Date: October 2026
Collection: Geometric Splendor
Theme: A sealed surface broken open by accident, the earlier circuit visible only through the cracks, blue and gold and silver showing under frosted red.
Palette: Cadmium Red · Crimson · Quinacridone Rose · Perylene Maroon · Quinacridone Magenta · Ultramarine Violet
Transformed from: Circuit Board of SELF (2026), itself painted over Abstraction (2023)
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.

His books, The Shape of Seeing and The Unalgorithmic Self, are available now.

https://www.rituart.com/
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