Bridget Riley, Point de départ @ Musée d'Orsay

Bridget Riley, Cataract 2, 1967

This small exhibition, tucked away in an upstairs gallery at Musée d'Orsay, is a gem. I have to be honest and admit that I have never seen a solo exhibition of Bridget Riley's painting and art work, and likewise am no expert on Op Art. The good news is that my lack of knowledge meant that the exhibition was eye-opening, in more ways than one.

Bridget Riley, Straight Curve, 1963

Riley has often discussed the influence of Seurat's pointillism on her work, particularly, his ability to capture light and shadow through line, his balayé technique and the optical effects of both for the viewer. Seurat was a painter who was interested in how the viewer sees, how to create a harmonious frame through laws of colour and contrast and the ability of colour to irradiate such that the eye perceives light and shadow. The current Riley exhibition expertly demonstrates how she extrapolates his intention, does away with the representational, and elevates painting to an experience of vision through looking at abstract works. Placing some of the Musée d'Orsay's Seurat paintings, sketches, and drawings next to Riley's sketches and fully-rendered paintings was thus not only illuminating, but fully convinced of Seurat as inspiration for the British artist.

Bridget Riley, Untitled, 1979

Standing before these paintings, we quickly recognize that they anticipate us as viewers, playing with our eyes as they move. It's difficult to focus on a single spot because there are no details, just shapes that appear and disappear as we move our eyes around and over the picture plane. Riley's meticulously conceived and executed lines and shapes dance and vibrate, dancing before our eyes. Over time, it's not that something becomes revealed, but that we can no longer look, and must turn away as the painting gives us a headache. At least, this was my experience. The most sophisticated of the works on display do not even need us to move our eyes, but rather, we hold our eyes still when standing in front of a work such as Cataract 2 and the lines and curves vibrate like waves on the ocean, of their own accord. 

Installation View

As is often the case with single artist exhibitions, Bridget Riley, Point de départ offers insight into the complexity and meticulousness, the conceptual sophistication of the artist's work. But it also helped me to see Seurat's paintings from a new perspective. When looking at a painting such as Seurat's Bathers at Asnières, 1884, our attention is fully focussed on the curvature of the backs of the boys on the grass, remembering Seurat's use of white and colour and scrambled brushstrokes to create hazy limits between figure and environment. Next to Riley, Seurat's curves become fascinating, rippling from canvas to canvas, from thenineteenth century painting to the twentieth century abstraction. And when juxtaposed with the Riley paintings influenced by Seurat's The Circus, the harmony and gaity created through opposite colours becomes writ large across Seurat's painting. 

Bridget Riley, Blue Landscape, 1959

As might be expected with a Bridget Riley show, this exhibition is a treat for the eyes. Light and shadow, curves and movement create paintings that dance for us, perform for our eyes, giving us cause to remember the deceptions of vision, the fact that nothing sits still in this world. We are reminded that our eyes operate in a particular way, our retina creating the changing colours and movements, shadows where there is only colour. And maybe in the end, we will ask ourselves if we are seeing things, if things are really as they appear. All this in paintings that are intellectual, revealing, and as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.