Rewriting Visual Language

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“Rewriting' gathers fragments of the moment and renders them eternal in layered abstraction.”

Rewriting (2024) is about returning to the page — the emotional and conceptual one. This 60 x 60 inch oil painting from the Out of Darknesscollection engages with the metaphor of revision: the act of rethinking, revisiting, and re-imagining one’s story.

The surface is layered with passages of warm gray, off-white, faded ink tones, and bright accents of orange and blue. Linear gestures mimic written text, but they drift — unreadable and rhythmic. Scratched lines and areas of heavy impasto give the piece a tactile memory, like a manuscript revised again and again.

I created Rewriting during a period of internal edit. A time when I realized that stories — personal or collective — are never finished. They’re always shifting beneath us. This painting reflects the tension between permanence and permission — the power to change what we once believed.

It resonates with the poetic abstraction of Cy Twombly and the textual impulse of Jenny Holzer, though mine leans away from language and toward its residue.

Rewriting isn’t about erasing. It’s about seeing things again — and letting that seeing shape what comes next.

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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