Page 33 - Studio International - July August 1971

4 Bridget Riley
Detail of Apprehend 1970
Casein on canvas
163 x 405 cm.

turquoise, olive and cerise, but an immaterial crucial involvement, singly or together, of off and in front of the painted surface. What a
presence of pale yellow with hints of further the tonal extremes of white and black. So far work like Untitled seems to presage is an
resonances from all parts of the spectrum. It is the stripe-paintings have all relied on white as exploitation of colour working simultaneously at
perhaps only by considering Riley's medium as the principal agent for irradiation effects—the different spatial-depths within a lateral
essentially coloured light that one can appreciate haze of optically induced colour which spreads structure, and this is at present being explored
why she gets her optical colour-mixes with so across the spaces and boundaries between in formats based on dots, circles and rings of
little straight reliance on the primaries and coloured stripes. Irradiation effects are colour rather than stripes. But side by side with
complementaries of the traditional colour- necessarily pale and transparent, and white this is Riley's concern to move not only beyond
circle. Coloured light does not mix in the same helps to make them more immediately visible. white, but beyond black and grey as agents for
way as coloured pigment, and coloured pigment But two important paintings of 197o, Apprehend irradiation effects. One of the most recent
which is aiming to produce coloured light must and Untitled, introduce dominant black and stripe-paintings achieves this brilliantly with a
presumably be mixed in yet another way grey stripes in addition to white as 'neutral' strong, clear red which avoids the somewhat
(traditional chromatic theory ranks yellow as a agents for the induced colours to spread across. muddied but hot glare of earlier 'red' paintings
primary : in a Riley painting it can be induced In the horizontal format of Apprehend these like the Byzantium of 1969, and carries the
from red and green). At the same time, Riley is blacks and greys increase steadily in width from irradiation as successfully as white without
not concerned with anything so mechanical as the top downwards, edged by very narrow but sacrificing the clarity of its own identity.
straight demonstrations of how this or that constant stripes of turquoise, ochre and violet : Narrow white stripes are still part of the
colour can be induced. Actual colour and the effect is a beautiful, if sombre, structure, but serve hardly more than as
apparent colour, pigment and light, combine transformation in the quality and hue of the boundaries between 'neutral' and 'active'
and re-combine within the sequential stripe- irradiation across the depth of the painting. sequences of red. The painting opens up
systems of the more complex paintings to But in Untitled, where the stripes are vertical, possibilities of an even wider range of spectral
produce an extremely wide range of finely Riley has gone a step further by introducing colour challenging our ability to perceive and
graded variations of hue and intensity. The two interwoven sequences of graded greys (or experience its existence. q
effect can be almost opalescent at times, and to rather by re-introducing them, for they refer
achieve it Riley tends to choose for her basic back to several uses of graded greys in earlier
constituents (the actual colours of the stripes) work). Where the irradiation is less dazzling in See, for example, her interview with David Sylvester,
colours which are already biased towards other itself than when white was the principal agent Studio International March 1967.
2`On Looking at Paintings by Bridget Riley', Art
colours —a greenish-blue, a bluish-red, a for it, she has re-directed attention back to a International, 1971.
yellowish-green—so that they have an inherent surface-conformation that gently buckles and Introduction to Hayward Gallery retrospective.
tendency to modulate or be influenced across a sways forward and back across the width of the 4Andrew Forge in fact interprets this edges-to-centre
reading as indicating a possible limitation of the
wide area of the spectrum. painting. A new richness of quality in the design striped paintings, and a criticism, if I understand
What also separates Riley's paintings from is suggested without having introduced any him right, of their coherence.
traditional colour-orchestration is the vital role new forms. 5 Hence Riley's early and still very relevant interest in
Seurat. One could say she had logically developed
played by tonality in making the colour work These two works indicate directions in which the optical techniques of colour-separation beyond
as it does. In the first place, optical fusion and Riley is likely to move in her use of colour. The the representation of light to generating the thing
interaction between the coloured stripes require buckled surface of Untitled points the way to itself.
an exact control of their tonal weight and explorations of the spatial depth at which the
balance—another reason for colours which in colour-effects operate. So far the striped
terms of relationships within the normal paintings have worked in terms of an even
colour-circle sometimes seem chromatically lateral spread combined with what is usually a
impure or off-Centre. But there is also the centralized irradiation-effect of colour standing
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