Perilous Equilibrium

By ROBERT HUGHES

At 39, Bridget Riley has had more than her share of misunderstanding. Few painters have been so ruthlessly plagiarized by commerce. As soon as her tightly organized, black-and-white abstractions began to wrench and prick the eyes of an international public in the mid-'60s, a horde of fabric designers and window dressers moved in. Riley, along with other painters like Vasarely and Soto, became synonymous with Op art; and Op itself became, in the hands of its exploiters, a chic gimmick that could market anything from underwear to wallpaper. By the summer of 1965, it seemed that every boutique in the West had its own coarse versions of Bridget Riley's optical dazzle.

The fad set up a backlash among serious critics: Were her paintings any more than a game with the retina? Indeed, they were; and the proof is a full-scale retrospective, opening this week at the Kunstverein in Hannover, Germany.

Painter Riley's development spans a ten-year arc from the aggressiveness of her early black-and-white images to the imperiled quiet of such new stripe paintings as Apprehend, 1970. First reactions to her work may run from puzzlement to nausea. But Riley has always denied she means to hurt the eyes, aiming only for "a stimulating, an active, a vibrating pleasure." But not relaxation --the pleasure is existential, a tuning of the consciousness. In a picture like Cataract III, the eye has no resting place. The viewer scans the inexorably waving lines with something akin to mounting panic, until the heaving surface can no longer be experienced as a flat plane. All that contradicts the eye's movement, and stabilizes it, is a swell of color intensity--turquoise and red coming out of gray and fading back again. The effect of such images is more akin to revelation than illusion, for it seems barely credible that so much energy could be contained in one pattern.

Cold Shower. Bridget Riley's paintings are nearly always made of such a formal unit--dot or stripe or ellipse--repeated and multiplied with tiny changes of position, tone or color. Through repetition, the force builds up. Then it peaks, like a laser emitting its stored energy in one flash. The serial changes (which may be no more than the slow rotation of a geometric "blip" of paint, happening a thousand times on one canvas) subvert, and at last explode, what would otherwise be a rigid order. "Everybody lives through states of disintegration but then finds something stronger that can't be disintegrated," she says. "The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one."

Her search for what cannot be disintegrated is intense, forcing the viewer to re-examine that perilous equilibrium we like to call normality. "We have to submit to the attack in the way we have to learn to enjoy a cold shower-bath," wrote Bridget Riley's admirer and mentor, the perceptual psychologist Anton Ehrenzweig. "There comes a voluptuous moment when the senses and the whole skin tingle with a sharpened awareness of the body and the world around."

-Robert Hughes

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