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Square Earth (2022) is a playful rupture of logic — a visual paradox that reframes how we imagine space, shape, and belief. Part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, this 90 x 90 inch mixed media piece balances structure with speculation, mapping the impossible with reverence.

The title riffs on flat-earth mythologies, but rather than mock, it meditates. What happens when we take belief and reframe it — not as fact or fiction, but as geometry? The square becomes a planet. The grid becomes a terrain. Color becomes philosophy.

The surface is layered with earth tones — ochre, rust, moss, charcoal — rendered in rectilinear patterns and broken symmetry. Embedded textures suggest erosion, tectonics, weather systems. You are not looking at the Earth, but through it — through a lens shaped by abstraction.

In method and attitude, Square Earth resonates with Frank Stella, particularly his early minimalist works where shape, form, and meaning coalesce without illusion. But where Stella pursued precision, I embrace decay — letting the geometry crack, peel, and breathe.

This painting is both conceptual and deeply material. It asks what happens when our assumptions of shape and world are destabilized — when a planet is a square, and abstraction is a map.

As part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, Square Earth challenges perception through irony and sincerity. It doesn’t resolve the tension — it invites you to live inside it.

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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