REVES | Robert Ritter

In this new series of artworks, created using mixed media on paper, artist Robert Ritter brings us an explosion of vibrant and luminous colors and messages. Blending psychedelic art, retro advertising, and religious icons ascending to heaven and surrounded by halos, the artist creates ultra-contemporary memento mori, drawing references for his themes from pop culture and the past.
The artwork is sold framed.

This work on paper is titled "Reves," which means "turns around" in Spanish and was intended as a threat to the Americans, but the word also means "dreams" in French. All these artworks oscillate between threat, appeal, and poetry. Originally conceived as a deconstruction of ideology, they unfold vast spaces of association, being both dark and beautiful.

REVES is part of a series of "art posters" created by Robert Ritter during the second lockdown. They exemplify how the global pandemic, while confining the entire world, also brought new forms of art and new artistic ideas to light. Robert Ritter decided to use public space as an exhibition area and began producing a series of paste-ups with spray paint. These artworks were conceived as a series of 12; each individual piece differs to varying degrees in color, but although they are part of a group concept, they are all unique. Disco balls hanging like ominous stars in the sky, birds, skulls, portraits... pop cultural references and the artist's personal memories merge into something new. Jürgen Graf: “Dark Pop: when mere kitsch meets something abysmal and takes on a depth that one wouldn't initially have expected from either. The works on paper are overlaid with texts that are also a mixture of song lyrics, Cuban propaganda slogans, or personal mottos. At first glance, the posters are meant to radiate great clarity. As if one immediately knew what message was being conveyed. Concentric circles, somehow psychedelic, but also decorative, loud and dark at the same time. In front of them, a flock of ravens, menacing, but also poetic.”

Robert Ritter can be described as a master of materiality, who knows how to use paint in the form of high relief: countless layers of paint are applied thickly, thus achieving tactile qualities of a veritable objecthood, while the last of these layers serves as the canvas for the final motif. In this way, Robert Ritter spans the spectrum from purely representational art, reminiscent of the figurative style of tattoo culture, through traditional maritime imagery, to the pure texture and material properties of paint. The canvas, as the support for the respective motif, sometimes becomes the base of the work itself, or is so thoroughly destroyed and reduced that it remains recognizable only as a net-like woven structure.

A suitable frame can be ordered by phone.

Other works by Robert Ritter