Bridget Riley

Marshall Matusow, Art Collectors Almanac No 1, New York 1965, p. 37, illustrated

Spanning four decades of remarkable innovation, Bridget Riley’s oeuvre offers a compulsive spectrum of visual experience that challenges the stability of our perceptions and enlivens our senses. Mesmerising the viewer into the visceral complexities of its apparently simple composition, when looking at Interrupted Cirle what we see is not merely its surface character. Rather, the visual experience is closely linked to and informed by our inner responses to it. “By using simple, real primary elements – shapes – and the relationships between them, her paintings place before us the inescapable evidence that visual experience is a construct comprising elements external to us and our subjective interpretation of our sensory experiences…. Her work is founded not on theory, but on a profound adherence to the “pleasures of sight” as a positive, illuminating and sustaining force in life.” (Paul Moorhouse in Exhibition Catalogue, Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art, Bridget Riley, Paintings and Drawings 1961-2004, 2004-05, p. 17)

Today, the arresting energy of Bridget Riley’s groundbreaking black and white compositions of the 1960s remains undiminished. Amongst the most radical and influential developments in the history of Post-War British art, Riley’s destabilisation of the image by tapping into the energies inherent in spatial relations shifted the focus away from the picture plane and into the space between the viewer and work of art. In doing so, she succeeded in finding a universal abstract language that seemed to unlock and clarify the way we see, and as Robert Melville commented, “No painter, dead or alive has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.” (Robert Melville, New Statesman, 1971)

Long before the Minimalist doctrine had set its roots, Riley’s commitment to the most simplified means of colour and form enabled her to purify her abstract language to one founded solely on optical effects and rhythmic compositional dynamics. This recalls the often cited influence of Futurism on Riley’s work, which she had encountered first hand during a trip to the Venice Biennale in 1960. In particular it was the ‘lines of force’ and dynamism in Giacomo Balla’s work that awakened Riley to the potential of interpenetrating repeated lines as an effective means of conveying light and movement.

Employing the simplest and most harmonious of geometric forms, the circle, Riley in the present work paints a series of thin black concentric lines against a pristine white background, that decrease in size from the outer edges towards its inner core. As the eye follows the sweeping momentum of the circle around its familiar course, the drama of the sudden vertical displacements are held in fragile balance by subtle repeated transitions of the tightly grouped circles, giving rise to a powerful tension and state of permanent flux.

Despite its overtly abstract form and language, Riley’s work and sensibility are derived from nature and intense visual experiences of her childhood growing up in Cornwall. As she observes, “The pleasures of sight have one characteristic in common – they take you by surprise,” and there is a feeling that for Riley the literal depiction of nature would be a distancing from the intensity of the experience. Rather than trying to recreate recognisable images, she offers the viewer fragments of reality in the form of simple shapes and colours to which the eye and mind can respond directly. Riley’s work offers an intensely rich visual experience and one of the marvels of an encounter with one of these early paintings is that the experience of seeing – the act of perception itself - is made apparent.

Interrupted Circle cannot effectively be described as the sum of its constituent parts nor simply in terms of its appearance. These ostensible surface delineations in a sense only contain a fraction of the work’s true nature. The elusive character of Riley’s work offers the viewer a unique perceptual experience that only is activated by the process and dynamics of looking. The systematic and precise nature of Riley’s approach removes any trace of her own hand from the composition, giving Interrupted Circle a self-perpetuating energy that challenges the conventional relationship of the active viewer to the passive work of art.