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Golden Shroud (2023) is a meditation on concealment — not as avoidance, but as reverence. This 48 x 48 inch mixed media work, part of the Pulse of Life Collection, explores what happens when light isn’t used to expose, but to veil.

The painting is layered with metallic gold washes, almost translucent, floating over a muted foundation of ash gray, bronze, and tarnished white. Underneath, barely-visible lines and fragmented forms shimmer and recede like shapes behind silk. The composition resists clarity. It asks you to stay awhile — to wait for the surface to settle.

I created Golden Shroud while reflecting on the sacred in abstraction — how covering something can also honor it. The gold in this painting isn’t decorative. It’s devotional. A material that both elevates and hides.

The work finds kinship with El Anatsui, whose shimmering installations collapse the distance between material richness and conceptual weight. Like Anatsui, I believe in the language of texture — in the story that glimmers beneath repetition and fold.

Golden Shroud is not a mask. It’s a ritual. A way of saying that some truths do not need to be revealed to be felt. The glow is not the message. It’s the gesture.

As part of the Pulse of Life Collection, this piece adds softness to geometry — suggesting that precision, too, can be gentle. And that not all gold is meant to shine brightly. Some is meant to hold space, quietly.

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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