Press Release (short version)

Psychic Landscapes is a very intimate exhibit that welcomes the viewer into a deeply personal world of moods and emotions. In this exhibition of vibrant paintings and dramatic sculpture, Rick Ritza invites the viewer to become conscious of how our beliefs have become embedded and woven into each of our psyches.

In recent years, Rick has found himself absorbed in books about cosmology asking him to believe in things he cannot see. He has also contemplated the opposite, which is that sometimes we are told not to believe in the things that we do see or perceive. He has come to the conclusion that believing in what we do or do not see applies to both inner and outer space. It is from this realization that the inspiration for Psychic Landscapes was born.

Press Release (long version)

In recent years, Rick has found himself absorbed in books about cosmology asking him to believe in things he cannot see. This led him to consider the fact that sometimes we are told not to believe in the things that we do see or perceive. He came to the conclusion that believing in what we do or do not see applies to both inner and outer space. It is from this realization that the inspiration for Psychic Landscapes was born. The result is a very intimate exhibit that welcomes the viewer into a deeply personal world of moods and emotions.

In several of the paintings, Rick uses passionate blues punctuated with a vibrant orange. This captures the state of ambivalence we often experience when we a have very strong and competing feelings about the same thing. In the painting titled Facing your fears, the viewer is asked to stare straight into the eyes of one of Rick's signature creatures. When the shock wears off, the viewer can see that there is a gentle nature to the eyes. This communicates the experience that many of us have. When we face our own fears, we often see, that at the core, the experience is not so threatening.

Included in the things we see that may or may not exist are positive and negative beliefs we carry about others and ourselves without concrete proof. Also included are spiritual and religious beliefs, new and old, as well as hallucinations, superstitions, and paranormal experiences. These processes and experiences have been occupying Rick's thoughts over time while he has been engaging in an intuitive approach to his art. For this body of work, as with others, he worked across multiple canvases and mediums as the images and sculptures associated with these concepts emerged. As these thoughts played in his mind, Rick became aware of how much we are shaped by these ideas. He invites the viewer to become conscious of how our beliefs have become imbedded and woven into each of our psyches.