Something to Blink At

Some artists are convinced that pleasing the eye is no virtue. They call themselves visual researchers, and their wriggly art is as readable as Dr. Jekyll's new, improved eye chart.

Chief visual researcher is Victor Vasarely, 56, a Hungarian who has lived in Paris since 1930. He lives as immaculately as he paints, speaks more like a physicist than a painter. Says he: "I do not like to use the word painting to describe my works; they are plastics." Then he asks: "What remains of the Muses, who inspired beautiful souls, under the hard light of biochemistry, genetics or bionics?" Answer: plastic art. Vasarely weaves zebra-ziggly patterns that actually seem to move on their white backgrounds.

Vitamin Vision. Mondrian and other constructivists were forerunners of calculated geometry. But Mondrian, explains Vasarely, "was still abstracting natural forms, the sea or a tree. My plastic abstractions are composed of pure form and pure colors with no relation to natural structures at all. By 1955 I had developed a plastic alphabet of 30 simple geometric forms and 30 basic interchangeable colors." The A of his alphabet is the square, and the rest proceeds through ovals, rhombi, etc., in a code of images down to the Z shape itself. With these pictorial tools, he broadcasts winnowing waves like those on a TV set after the last late show ends. They are, he says of his works now at London's Brook Street Gallery, Paris' Gallery Denis Rene and Manhattan's Pace Gallery, "a nourishment for all, just like consciousness, rhythm, song or vitamins."

The master has pupils that he has never even met. One is U.S. Painter Richard Anuszkiewicz (TIME, July 19). Another is Bridget Riley, 32, whose visual torments are on view in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery. Precise black and white herringbone lines constantly wriggle, peak and valley, in an embodiment of vertigo. Visitors have become nauseated and dizzied by Riley's intense, chattering images that force their eyes to jerk to and fro. Not simply geometric tricks, they are larger than sheer optical delusions: orderliness clashes with chaos in the precarious proximity of black and white bands. They also teach that man cannot always master his senses.

Math Book Muse. A slight, trim, brunette bachelor girl, Bridget Riley is now a Jill-of-all-trades in the London office of the advertising empire of J. Walter Thompson. She spent her youth during the blitz in Cornwall and Lincolnshire, which she calls "a fascinating horizontal landscape, terrifically recessional." After three years at the Royal College of Art, she began following her pointillist god Seuiat and the interpenetrating planes of Italian futurism. Now she lives in a bone-white flat with white-painted floors as stark as her work. She designs on graph paper, often resorts to math books for inspiration, turns the actual execution over to apparently myopic artisans to reproduce on canvas.

The art of visual research is often challenged as phony. Yet in the permutations of pattern that sometimes hurt and sometimes enchant human vision lie the power and the challenge to change reality. As Bridget Riley says, "I wish somebody would give me a big wall to destroy. I mean, to make it no longer seem a wall."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.