VICTOR VASARELY | Likka-B-Pos

Jean Rets, Liège
Private Collection, France
Thence by descent to the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is lighter in the original. Condition: The work is in very good condition. All collaged elements appear stable. Extremely close inspection reveals a few tiny and unobtrusive spots of rubbing in isolated places to the extreme outer edges and two minute specks of loss; one approximately 15 cm up from the bottom left hand corner and one to the top left edge of the largest collaged square. Further close inspection reveals some unobtrusive scuffs to the extreme edges of the artist's frame. No restoration is apparent when examined under UV light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Likka-B-Pos is an exceptionally pure and accomplished example of French-Hungarian artist Victor Vasarely’s Black And White period. A black square, comprising sixteen by fourteen black cells, is visually complicated by a pair of inapposite lines of eight black cells each. Like an undiscovered pool in a maze of binary graphite, a blue square is nestled within the black; its deep azure cells rotated in a subtle and disorienting helix towards its centre. As though in a whirlpool or vortex, the viewer’s eye tends to a grail-like collection of four delicate blue diamonds at the core. The uppermost 8-bit line protrudes into an off-white backdrop, apparently detached from another structure: a broken, tangential square containing a smaller duplicate of itself. The elegant geometry of these crisp lines evokes infinite expansion, while the strange sinkhole below conjures dense and unfathomable depths. The present work is written in the first ever version of the pioneering ‘Alphabet Plastique’.This iteration contained seven ‘unités plastiques’ (essentially blueprints of shapes) and eight colours of three hues each. Astonishingly, this alphabet is effectively an object-oriented programming language for the creation of artworks, devised decades before such languages’ emergence in computer science. First, the nature of a given unité is determined through assignments of values to the shape, colour and hue parameters of the language. Then the hitherto abstract unité is physically instantiated in the cell of a grid, whose foreground and background are assigned specific hues from the available colours. As a consequence of these stages alone, infinitely-many works are generable from possible value-assignments. Likka-B-Pos, then, foreshadows not just Vasarely’s own scintillating Vega and Gestalt series of the 1960s and 70s, but the very technologies used and subverted by 21st century new media artworks.

Despite its digital structures, Vasarely’s work remains curiously painterly and organic. Like Auguste Herbin – who had from 1927 explored crystalline and vegetal forms – Vasarely’s computational aesthetic had its roots in an infatuation with the natural world. In his ‘Belle-Isle’ period of 1949 -1954, Vasarely fashioned works capturing permutations in the properties of coastal pebbles. Even in the most apparently austere of his works, the artist’s hand remains a creative force. Demiurge of both the parameters of the languages and the entire system in which such tools can be meaningfully applied, Vasarely makes serendipitous aesthetic judgements within a deterministic system. The resultant works, including Likka-B-Pos, model a Cartesian soul unconstrained by the law-governed physical world.



The authenticity of the present work has been confirmed by Pierre Vasarely, President of the Fondation Vasarely, universal legatee and the moral right holder of Victor Vasarely. This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné de l’Oeuvre Peint de Victor Vasarely, which is currently being compiled by the Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence.