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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.
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
