The knock on him is that without an explanation, you can't get his work. Reviewers use words like indecipherable , complicated or obscure to describe his art. In the first place, art isn't something you get. You don't get Johns's Flag , a bunch of dots by Kusama or Kara Walker's cutouts. Additionally, if you look at Ritchie's exhibition, patterns emerge.
Every work is an elaboration on every other work.
Follow any one element, shape, or character, and kingdoms of possibility open up. Take the color red. A number of crimson bumps or barnacles grow on the wall mural's blue tentacles. Whatever they are, one of these clusters appears in M Theory , a painting which depicts this red mass spewing all sorts of bizarre shapes, rainbows and globules. The outcome of all this can be seen in one of three works titled Parents and Children , in which the little chips coalesce into a planetoid that sprouts three tree forms.