REVIEW

NEW WORKS 2026 JULIA RITSON

Scarlet Lili Thomas

At Scott Livesey Galleries, Julia Ritson’s ‘New Works 2026’ unfolds as an encounter with a system that flickers between ancient mosaic, modernist logic and digital circuitry ✷

The grid reads as something metabolising. Surfaces are divided into four-edged units — tiles, pixels, tesserae — yet they refuse mechanical regularity. The foundational lines that structure them remain faintly visible, bowing and curving as though under subtle atmospheric pressure. Geometry is present, but it is not authoritarian. It bends.

The compositions suggest order: a rational scaffolding inherited from modernism and the disciplined languages of abstraction. But colour begins to vibrate. Some paintings lean toward psychedelic intensity — acid greens and molten yellows clashing with electric violets — creating a sensation of pixelation, as though a clearer image has been “gridified,” broken down into data. Phantom landscapes begin to emerge: topographies, distant mountain ranges dissolving at sunset. Just as quickly, the image withdraws. What appeared geological becomes purely optical. The land collapses back into paint.

In ‘Untitled 2508’ and ‘Untitled 2509’, the surfaces feel thermal — like infrared imaging capturing fluctuating zones of weather and heat-activated energy.

There is something distinctly technological in this experience. A pixel is a minute unit of illumination; Ritson’s tiles operate similarly — discrete yet interdependent. Yet unlike the frictionless glow of a screen, these works insist on the hand. The grid becomes tactile, almost textile — at times recalling worn masonry or fragments of ancient mosaic. The reference to opus vermiculatum, the “worm-like” contouring of Greco-Roman mosaics, feels apt: colour does not simply fill space but shapes depth within flatness.

Historically aligned with rationality and modern systems — from urban plans to digital networks — the grid here is both echoed and unsettled. Ritson invokes the digital matrix but resists its slickness. These paintings foreground decision and adjustment. The human hand re-enters the schematic.