Remember the old joke about what the Zen Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor? If you answered, "Make me one with everything," you've already captured the thinking behind Matthew Ritchie's newest project, which is modeled after nothing less than the laws of the universe and realized by a motley mix of collaborators — theoretical physicists, tech-whiz engineers, and experimental musicians. "It has hubris written all over it, doesn't it?" the 44-year-old artist says with a disarming, self-effacing chuckle as he describes the dimension-blasting structure, The Morning Line, opening in October at the Seville Biennial.
The London-born Ritchie knows a thing or two about lines. As a painter showing regularly since 1995 in New York (where he lives with his wife and young son), he became known for applying sinewy ropes of color that slink their way across gallery walls and coil like sleeping cobras on floors. In The Morning Line, Ritchie goes well beyond the 2-D world of painting. Commissioned to create a pavilion for the Seville show by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna, Ritchie enlisted the design team of Aranda/Lasch and engineers from the firm Arup, who are known for mining computational models and molecular structure. Walking through the open-ended aluminum structure — "part monument, part ruin," in Ritchie's words — you become aware of a mutating soundtrack (provided by the likes of Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and wunderkind composer Nico Muhly) and the constantly changing dimensions of what you're seeing: "What appear to be volumes become lines. I imagine it's what it's like to walk into a drawing: It's not quite clear if something's real or not." You might find the math and science fuzzy (Heisenberg uncertainty principle, anyone?), but you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to relish the result.
