The new work by Matt Rich on Fay Avenue aims to add to La Jolla’s public art scene – and conversation – with an abstract, tactile piece.

Proving that less is not always more, Murals of La Jolla has installed San Diego-based abstract painter Matt Rich’s “Ampersand” at 7744 Fay Ave in The Village.

This is the 51st mural commissioned by Murals of La Jolla, a project of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library originally initiated by the La Jolla Community Foundation in 2010 to commission large-scale art for public spaces around La Jolla.

“Ampersand” is a collage of materials, forms and colors that exemplify Rich’s creative process, whereby he prepares bits of canvas with paint, cuts them and joins them together to make an image.

“I don’t work on a stretch canvas,” Rich said. “I don’t work on a rectangle. I work piece by piece to build a painting on my tabletop.”

As Rich adds more and more pieces of canvas, “these paintings grow,” he said. “I think of it as a very flexible process for creating. … I’m not burdened by … some sort of predetermined form.”

For this “Ampersand” piece, Rich – who often eschews rectangles for unique contours – placed the irregularly-shaped mural on a more traditionally-shaped background based on a photograph of its intended stucco wall, aided by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

 “I love the ampersand as a form,” Rich said, “because it’s this beautiful line that’s been sort of twisted and turned, [with] two loops [and] two interior voids.

“There’s all sorts of ways that this simple line gets twisted up into this beautiful, unbalanced form [that] I find really generative and really interesting.”

Rich’s use of the “&” character is a signature of his, representing openness to more. 

“I love the idea of ‘and’,” he said, noting his work is often displayed among other artists’. 

“It’s not just you, it’s your work, connecting to other people,” Rich said. “I wanted to make that literal.”

That inclusivity speaks to why Murals of La Jolla’s Art Advisory committee chose it.

The vibrant, energetic collage “brings together different forms and colors and textures in a way that just brings a lot of life and movement to a … busy pedestrian corridor,” said Murals of La Jolla Executive Director Taylor Chapin. 

“We felt [Rich’s] work and this kind of tactility would translate effectively into this scale and to this medium,” she added. 

The playful nature of “Ampersand” will lend itself to “connection and encouraging people to pause and look and engage with their surroundings in a new way,” Chapin said.

The new mural replaces Marcos Ramirez Erre’s “To Reflect the Times,” the last in a three-part series of murals commissioned for that site since 2015.

The Erre pieces, reminiscent of eye charts with block text, were quite different from the abstract, fluid nature of “Ampersand,” which Chapin said is intentional.

“It’s definitely something that our advisory considers … with the next invitation,” she said, “to do something that feels very different and unexpected.”

This is Rich’s first public mural; he considers it “a real honor to be in that conversation,” he said, adding the Murals of La Jolla program is an important one.

“We think about how inundated we are with advertisements and billboards and all these things,” Rich said, “so to put something that doesn’t have that same agenda at scale in public with no barrier to engagement or disengagement is pretty exciting.”