ART & APOCALYPSE

ARTNET
By Eleanor Heartney

"How this all Ends" (2008) By Matthew Ritchie

NEW YORK - Travelers driving into New York City on the Major Deegan Expressway may notice a huge billboard with the thundering words "JUDGMENT DAY May 21, 2011." And you can find it in contemporary art. For Outsider Artists, Armageddon seems like a natural subject. We must mention Matthew Ritchie whose ongoing narrative is based loosely on John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. Divided into chapters featuring color-coded characters, these incredibly complex abstract works center around proliferating stories of seven groups of seven characters who are also metaphysical principles or laws of physics. Ritchie maintains that the "ekpyrotic" theory of the cosmos, which holds that the universe came about from the collision of two "branes" (the fundamental units of string theory), is analogous to the epic battle of Paradise Lost, while Milton’s description of Hell as “darkness visible” is another name for what contemporary physics calls "dark matter." This conflict inspires his own work, as can be seen in a painting appropriately titled How This Ends (2008). [link]