Mr. Universe

NEW YORK -- Matthew Ritchie is obsessed with information. "You used to go find information in a book," the artist says. He grabs a notebook out of a reporter's hands and fills a page with earnest doodlings that resemble margin notes from an astrophysics textbook. "Now it drenches us constantly. So how do you deal with that? Not through some logical system whereby you first learn A, then B, then C. Instead, you need a way that's at least partly based on chance, because we live in a chance environment. We all have to accept that we're never going to get the full picture about anything."

Ritchie is seated at a long worktable in his TriBeCa studio. With movie-star looks -- he has been described at least once as a "Hugh Grant look-alike" -- and a relaxed, ready grin, he seems far less intense in person than the canvases he fills with such frenetic energy. What it all comes down to, Ritchie continues, are big questions about why we're here and where we'll end up. "The beauty of games of chance," he says, "is they're little lives into which all this stuff is collapsed. You get a few random cards. You play 'em. You're dead. You start again."

"Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player," the mind-bending installation that opens at MASS MoCA this weekend for a yearlong run, fulfills a longstanding goal of Ritchie's: to construct a body of work around the idea that with so much information bombarding us, either we find a way to filter out what's useful -- to "play inside the grid," in his words -- or risk being overwhelmed.

"The fundamental description of how the universe works has changed three or four times in the past 15 years alone," he says, "which just shows you how open those questions are. It's a game. And that's really what my work is about, creating a model of how I'm thinking at the moment."

"Proposition Player" -- the term refers to a hired casino operative who encourages patrons to play alongside him -- pulls together much of what Ritchie has been exploring for the past decade: It's a visual representation of the universe's creation and evolution from Big Bang to present day, from the subatomic to the intergalactic. Within the multilayered narrative he has constructed are 49 characters with distinctive physical and metaphysical attributes, woven into a complex cosmology that draws liberally from mythology, thermodynamics, cartography, mathematics, quantum physics, dice games, voodoo, cartoons, and other sources, highbrow and low.

A `world builder' Grand in scale -- one wall drawing in the show is more than 200 feet long -- and intellectually supercharged, Ritchie's work has made him an important figure in the contemporary art world. MASS MoCA curator Laura Steward Heon places him within a group of cosmologically minded artists, or "world builders" (sculptor-filmmaker Matthew Barney is another) who create objects based on complex information systems of their own design.

What makes Ritchie's pieces so distinctive, says Heon, who curated the 2001 MASS MoCA exhibit "Game Show," is their beauty.

Ritchie makes it very clear that "he uses the cosmology as a way to organize lines, shapes, and colors, which are ultimately most important," says Heon. "The emphasis is always on the objects."

At Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum, where "Proposition Player" was first mounted in December, the installation included paintings, drawings, light boxes, murals, a massive floor sculpture (topped with tiny humanoid heads), and a digitally animated craps table. The North Adams show will include most of these, plus a few site-specific additions and a rentable audio guide to Ritchie's sprawling cast of characters. At MASS MoCA, as in Houston, each viewer will also receive a card from a deck specially designed by Ritchie. The card is used as an entry point to the exhibit's interactive elements.

The characters represented in Ritchie's deck include Beelzebub (a.k.a. The Gambler), Raphael (The Day Watch), Belphegor (The Dead), and Abraxas (The Fast Set). The cards in turn are linked in poker-hand fashion to individual paintings in the show, not only by numbers and suits but by characters' attributes as well. A wall chart spells out the rules and levels of Ritchie's game-within-a-game, which include groupings such as units of measurements (mass, temperature, etc.) and elements of atomic reactions (gluons, photons).

In person, Ritchie, 40, is refreshingly down-to-earth, joking about the daunting amount of information he throws at viewers yet dispelling any notion that a PhD is necessary to understand the work. Or even that he knows much more about game theory than, say, the average "World Series of Poker" ESPN viewer or Dungeons & Dragons nut.

"The first reaction you hope for is people going, `Whoa, that's great,"' he says, with traces of an English accent. "Forget the rules. It's like when you see a really good game. You don't know what the rules are. You just think it looks cool and want to play."

To those who reject the idea that "art holds any information at all" or that looking below a piece's surface can be rewarding, he says, that's a shame. "To me, information is a kind of surface, a beauty all its own," asserts Ritchie. "And with this show, you get the surface and a little bit below it, too. A little X-ray vision."

At the same time, he concedes that only a thin line separates wallowing in big ideas like these and "gluing cardboard boxes to parking meters, talking about string theory," as he jokingly puts it.

One man's trash . . . As Ritchie tells the story, he left his native England in the late 1980s and landed in New York. Never terribly keen on academics -- he earned a BFA from a London art school after spending a semester at Boston University in 1982 -- and with no clear career path ahead, by chance (that word again) he got a job as a building superintendent. Living near New York University, he rummaged through trash bins looking for discarded textbooks. Time on his hands ("You mostly wait around for things to leak") allowed him to read extensively in arcane fields such as medieval history and philosophy of science.

A kind of alchemy took place, according to Ritchie. Up until then, he explains, "I was pretty skeptical about this idea of being an artist, or that the world needed any new things. There's a huge difference between being an artist and just making art. And I was only occasionally making art."

Change -- and chance -- intervened, though. He began writing pieces for Flash Art magazine, giving him an excuse to visit artists' studios and discuss their work in detail. Meanwhile, the Manhattan art world was suffering through a severe recession, which turned out to be a positive development for Ritchie, who between 1993 and 1995 managed to secure his first studio and land his first one-man show.

"The whole '80s thing with the coke and limos was gone," he recalls. "Things were really quiet, so artists had time to think about what they were doing. I started putting all this stuff together and inviting people to my studio to talk about it. And they said, `Well, this is all really fascinating. But no one will ever care.' So I decided to make a chart listing everything I was interested in -- a shopping list, really -- and go from there."

Where he went was to cramming everything from Judeo-Christian mythology to high-temperature physics into a medium -- painting -- primed to absorb whatever he could throw at it. He wrote stories about his growing cast of characters.

On the map In 1997, his work was selected for the Whitney Biennial, a pivotal moment that put Ritchie prominently on the art-world map. Five years later, he mounted his first large-scale installation, a three-part piece titled "Games of Chance and Skill," which remains on display at MIT's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center in Cambridge.

Jane Farver, director of MIT's List Visual Arts Center, says campus response has been overwhelmingly positive, whether from student athletes or maintenance people or Nobel laureates. "Professors tell me constantly they take people to see it," says Farver. "It's remarkable how Matthew visualized the space, lighting, and traffic patterns and made eveything work so beautifully."

As Ritchie continued to work out his own highly personalized language of information, the original laundry list morphed into a series of maps, which in turn were incorporated into a 49-character story, which was ultimately folded inside an elaborate game of chance -- with Ritchie as house dealer.

Asked if he's spent time in real casinos, or otherwise considers himself a gambler, Ritchie grins.

"I love it, but I can't afford it," he says, laughing at the memory of an unlucky day, or two, at the dog track. "You can only really gamble if it's not about winning." He pauses. "There's this moment between placing the bet and the race itself, or the rolling of the dice," he says, "when all possibilities are open. That's the real buzz, not walking home a winner. The end is kind of depressing either way."

According to Ritchie, younger viewers tend to be less intimidated by "Proposition Player" than older ones. At the Houston opening, he says, a group of teenagers dressed up as characters from Ritchie's work (they had followed the stories on a website) and frolicked about, while the 8-year-old son of the show's curator, who traded Yu-Gi-Oh cards with Ritchie, pronounced his game to be "cool, but pretty easy."

Says Ritchie, "Then you have the 50-year-olds who say, `Oh, this is so difficult!' So I'm either doing something very right or very wrong. Generationally, though, I'm right in the middle."

His next large-scale project, an installation for a new federal courthouse being built in Eugene, Ore., will confront more big ideas such as good and evil, justice and retribution. While that project is a couple of years away, other aspects in Ritchie's life are more immediately in flux. He and his wife, Garland Hunter, an actress, are expecting their first child this month.

"Talk about radical change," says Ritchie. "All you can do is set up the parameters, I guess. And then, the dice will roll."

Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.