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Stargate (2022) is a painting about passage — about portals not to other places, but to other ways of perceiving. Part of the Geometric Splendor Collection, this 90 x 90 inch acrylic work creates a space where symmetry dissolves into speculation, and abstraction becomes invitation.
At the center of the canvas is a circular form embedded in a shifting grid — a gate, a lens, a halo. It glows with deep ultramarine, silvery ash, and flashes of gold, like light refracted through dream logic. Geometry organizes the canvas, but it doesn’t dominate. It hovers. It pulses.
I created Stargate thinking about thresholds — the space between what we know and what we sense. It’s inspired in part by the idea of a literal stargate from science fiction, but also by spiritual architecture: mandalas, cathedral windows, temple doorways. The image is not meant to transport you elsewhere. It’s meant to anchor you in the awareness that something else is possible.
This piece resonates with the luminous abstraction of James Turrell, whose installations dissolve boundaries between perception, space, and light. Like Turrell, I want the work to feel less like an object and more like an encounter.
Stargate doesn’t open in the narrative sense. It opens in the perceptual sense. It holds stillness while radiating possibility. A shape to stand in front of — and fall into.
As part of Geometric Splendor, this work extends the language of form into the realm of presence. The gate is not beyond you. It is already inside.
From the painter
Two books by Ritu Raj
An abstract painter can't paint from eight to five. In the hours away from the canvas, the paintings began to ask for words. These are the books that came from that.
The painting on this page, Orbit of Blue, is the cover of The Shape of Seeing.
The Shape of Seeing
The Genesis of Abstraction
Short essays on time, geometry, shadow and breath, and on what happens between a person and an abstract canvas.
Hardcover · Paperback · Kindle
The Unalgorithmic Self
Art, AI, and the Future of Human Thinking
A machine can answer a question. Only a human can wonder. A book about remembering ourselves in an age of intelligent machines.
Hardcover · Paperback · Kindle
