Culture
Optic nerve
by William McAloon
A major new Bridget Riley show proves that, for all her works’ notorious coolness and perfectionism, there is also real emotional feeling in these dizzy curves, pulsing stripes and “clusters of colour sensations”.
In a 1967 interview with the critic David Sylvester, British painter Bridget Riley couldn’t quite get his point that her paintings hurt. “Do you want your work to be aggressive towards the spectator?” Sylvester asked. “Do you like it to hurt your eyes?” Riley pleaded ambivalence: “I don’t mind either way. But I remember being surprised when people complained that it hurt their eyes, because it has never hurt mine.”
That Riley’s eyes are made of sterner stuff than the norm would seem to be obvious – indeed, a necessity for a career as a painter that spans more than 40 years.
The works that she and Sylvester were discussing were the black and white paintings of the early 1960s, several of which feature in Wellington’s City Gallery’s exhibition, organ ised with the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney and the British Council. “Shiver”, “Breathe”, “Tremor”, “Climax” – their titles offer analogies for the kind of intense bodily effect the paintings induce.
It’s these paintings for which Riley perhaps remains best known, seemingly forever lodged in the late modernist cul-de-sac of Op Art. Bastardised in popular culture, they were dismissed by high-minded American critics (Clement Greenberg, despite his pleas for a painting based on “pure opticality”, lumped them in with other forms of “novelty art”). Eighties appropriationists plundered them as exemplary of modernism’s failure.
There is, however, much more to Riley than those works, as this exhibition reveals. Following the intensity of black and white, she moved into colour in the late 60s – the dizzying, twisted curves of red and blue of “Cataract” (1967) and the pulsing stripes of red, blue and green in “Late Morning” (1967-8). In the 1970s, these softened into paintings of subtle and sensuous colour – the pinks and oranges, turquoises and lilacs of “Aurum” (1976) or “Song for Orpheus 3” (1978). The eye is still dazzled by these canvases, but it is Riley’s feeling for optical harmonies that shines through.
This is something else that the exhibition reveals, that for all the apparent sternness of the early works or the intricate perfection of the large canvases, Riley’s work is felt. Numerous studies and preparatory works – as much of a highlight of the show as any of the paintings – bring us close to the painter in her studio. A sense emerges here that Riley, for all her exactitude – ruler, graph paper and compass are her tools, and the finished paintings are executed by studio assistants – she spends as much time feeling her way through her work, that it’s the product of an emotional, as much as an intellectual, process.
Equally important is a sense of place, of the value in her work of local colour. “Reef” (1977) and “Bali” (1982) grew out of a trip to Australia and Indonesia, while a visit to the tombs at Luxor and other ancient Egyptian sites was equally stimulating. The remembered blues of the Nile dominate her works of the early 1980s, their vertical stripes unfolding in a stately progression. In the catalogue, Riley tells Jenny Harper of a more recent trip to the Alhambra in Spain, describing the architecture as “letting off clusters of colour sensations, of dynamics that seem to lose their moorings completely from the structures that gave rise to them”.
Something similar has happened in Riley’s works since the late 1990s. There is a feeling of liberation and expansiveness, a confidence perhaps born of the renewed recognition and reassessment that has greeted her work in a succession of major surveys since the mid-1990s, culminating with the retrospective at the Tate in 2003.
Whatever the reason, paintings such as “Parade” (2002) and “Evoë 3” (2003) have a Matissean joie de vivre in their looping curves, ethereal forms and dancing play of colours. Certainly, there are moments in the exhibition where Sylvester’s prognosis of the work seems to hold true: it does at times injure the eye. If this is so, then Riley’s recent paintings are the perfect treatment.
BRIDGET RILEY: Paintings and Preparatory Work 1961-2004, City Gallery, Wellington (until June 26).
