![]() ![]() But now, keyed into the directions of the ovals, my eyes began to dart uncontrollably around the canvas, the ovals now buzzing bees. So I returned to the first hypothesis, which undistracted inspection seemed to confirm, then stepped back to survey the puzzle I thought I’d solved. ![]() Thinking I was onto Riley’s secret game, I figured the orientational logic of these tiny black eggs must be producing the bulge but no, each row and column seemed to have its own quirks that couldn’t possibly build into a symmetrical optical effect. Wondering if the dots were set more widely as they approached the middle, I moved in to better eyeball the distances, noticing instead that the dots are really ovals, and, actually, they’re pointing in different directions, and, hey, most or maybe all of them are angled in sequence, rotated by consistent intervals along the rows and columns of the grid. This painting seemed simple, even boring, before I sensed a funny swelling at its core. Standing back to appreciate this illusion revealed an effect that’s harder to explain: a humming crosscurrent of candy cane stripes, emerging along the valleys of the painting’s parallel curves.įeeling properly primed, I rounded a corner and came to Static 4 (1966), whose tiny black dots form a grid like a pegboard on a square white background. I drew close to find the source of the tension, discovering that the painting’s positive and negative spaces gradually narrow or widen just a little as they meander, shifting the ratio of black to white and explaining why, from a distance, some sections of black seem to drift into gray. My brain wanted to see the lines as perfectly uniform, but my eyes, being rumbled and squeezed by some unknown force, wouldn’t agree. In the show’s dramatic first painting, slender black lines-169 of them-slither in northwesterly unison across a huge white canvas. The suggested journey through Bridget Riley: Perceptual Abstraction, which opened yesterday along with the Center, begins on the third floor in the manner of Riley’s decades-long career in optical (or op) art: with works in black and white. We think we’re in control of how we see things, but the paintings of Bridget Riley, including the many now on view at the Yale Center for British Art, remind us our eyes possess a mind of their own. ![]()
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