Something happened when you saw this. What was it?
Abstract Inquiry · 2026
Window to Seeing
$9,000 USD
Available · in the studio, Phoenix
Two shutters swing open, and what is behind them is not a view but a memory of one.
Window to Seeing (5 × 5 ft, oil on canvas) began in 2022 and was finished in 2026. Its subject is a window Ritu Raj saw in Picasso's home in Paris, but the painting is not a picture of that window. It is what was left of it after four years: two shutters swung open, a facade whose windows are scratched into the paint by hand, and a street that dissolves before it reaches the bottom edge.
That is what places the work in the Abstract Inquiry collection. You can still name what you see, a window, shutters, a wall of windows, yet nothing in it is observed. The perspective is impossible, the light comes from inside the building, and the lower half lets go of description entirely. On ArtGraph's Abstraction Quotient it reads 1: just past the border where a painting stops reporting a place and begins remembering one.
The surface carries the years. Layers were laid down, scraped back and painted again, and the drawn lines of the small windows sit in the top coat like handwriting. It is a painting about the act of seeing, which is why it keeps one hand on the thing seen.
Where to see it. In person at RituStudio, Phoenix, by appointment. Represented by Jarrow & Goodman, Los Angeles.
The space it needs
- Wall
- At least 7 ft wide
- Ceiling
- 9 ft or more
- Light
- Warm, even light from the front or slightly above. The yellow facade glows under warm light; raking light brings up the scraped and incised windows.
- Daylight
- Hang it facing a real window if you can. Daylight warms the ochres and the blue shutter cools by contrast, so the painting shifts through the day like the view it remembers.
Lives best in
Living room 5/5
A window for a room that does not have one. At five feet square it anchors a sofa wall, and the open shutters do what real windows do: they pull the room outward and give the eye somewhere to go.
Hotel lobby 4/5
The architectural frame reads clearly across a lobby or lounge, and the story of a window seen in Paris and painted years later gives a hospitality space something to tell its guests.
Details
- Size
- 5 × 5 ft (W × H)
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Year
- 2026
- Collection
- Abstract Inquiry
- Palette
- Raw Umber · Raw Sienna · Sap Green · Cerulean Blue · Phthalo Turquoise · Cadmium Yellow · Indian Red
- Weight
- About 35 lb
- Ready
- In the studio; delivery 6–10 weeks
Its ArtGram
ArtGram.Spray
- Texture4
- Form4
- Colour range4
- Palette1.1
- Contrast3.3
- Abstraction Quotient1
