Despite relying heavily on patterns and structure, Bridget Riley's work isanything but formulaic, writes Aidan Dunne
Most paintings you look at, but Bridget Riley's look at you. She made her name with a series of intricately patterned, geometric, black-and-white abstracts in the 1960s. They are composed of lines, dots, triangles, discs and comparable forms in tight bands or concentric patterns. They have the air of being exercises but are never just uniformly repetitious. Our eyes are lulled into expecting something regular and predictable, but what we presume will be calm and orderly veers off into dizzy irregularity. To engage with the rebarbative surfaces of these paintings is to have your gaze thwarted and thrown back at you.
For this reason, a visit to Riley's current retrospective at Tate Britain is likely to be unusually taxing on your eyes, but also exceptionally rewarding and uplifting. You will find her more recent work, both at Tate Britain and at her exhibition of gouaches and prints at the Green on Red Gallery in Dublin, much easier on the eye, but still challenging in other respects.
Because of its emphasis on optical properties, it is tempting to appraise her work purely in terms of its optical effects, and commentators more often than not succumb to the temptation. By dint of instinct and experience, she obviously knows a great deal about the mechanics of perception. She gives a literal meaning to Bacon's remark about paintings being a trap for the eye. But why should a painter want to make it difficult for us to see?
Here, although she is a steadfastly abstract artist who has, throughout her career, worked with a rigorously-ordered geometric language, she is surprisingly forthcoming in terms of an emotional rationale. It has to do with the break-up of a relationship that was important to her. This happened in the autumn of 1960. Prior to that, she had not been an abstract artist, although her earlier, representational paintings were highly calculated optical constructions.
Born in London in 1931, she spent the war years with her mother in Cornwall while her father served with the armed forces. From Cheltenham Ladies College she went on to study art at Goldsmiths College, London, and then at the Royal College of Art. But she was fundamentally dissatisfied and unsure of how to proceed artistically. In fact, she worked for an advertising agency before becoming seriously interested in the possibilities offered by painting.
In 1959 she met and began a relationship with Maurice de Sausmarez, an older painter and scholar. It was the break-up of this relationship that plunged her into a severe personal and artistic crisis. She was tempted to give up painting altogether. Instead, she decided she wanted to start anew and has written, unequivocally, that in setting out to paint an all-black painting, she was sending "a very personal message to a particular person, about the nature of things". In fact, she was disappointed with the pictorial limitations of an entirely black painting. She went on to paint the elegant Kiss, in which pictorial tension is generated by the charged proximity of two black masses, divided by a curved white sliver of light.
That initial image was the precursor of a fantastically-fruitful series of black and white paintings in which the notion of pictorial regularity and coherence is warped and undermined by a recurrent, unpredictable fault zone. This zone literally disrupts our vision. We experience it as a physical interruption when we attempt to make sense of a painting in a conventional way. Faced with conflicting optical messages, our perceptive apparatus flickers uncertainly between mutually exclusive interpretations, and the resultant physical sensation can be as extreme as dizziness, or even nausea.
In fact, much is made of the unsettling physical effects of Riley's paintings. They are visually unsettling, but at the same time the responses can tend to be exaggerated. There is pleasure as well as discomfort in letting your eyes roam in a zone of visual uncertainty, and you can always look away for a respite. What is true is that there is a great deal of strong emotion bound up in their surfaces, and a simmering, angry, even accusatory quality to some of their titles, such as Deny, Burn or Disturbance.
They became iconically linked to the 1960s, and brought a degree of fame to Riley, probably not for their generation of optical discomfort or, for that matter, their meticulously intellectual approach, but arguably because of their use of visual dynamism as a means to something like an altered state of consciousness.
Often we can never quite hold onto the surface details in themselves, and find ourselves looking instead, at a kind of optical buzz generated as a slight remove from the painting per se. It is as if we literally cannot see what we are looking at. Riley became extremely interested in this quality and explored it in a concerted way right up to about 1980.
Given her concerns and her pictorial means at the mid-1960s, the subsequent developments in her work were neither safe nor predictable. In the latter half of the decade she moved into the use of colour in permutations of vertical, horizontal and diagonal stripes. A few years into the 1970s, she moved to curved, wave-like forms, the basis of a series of ambitious, shimmering paintings that, striking though they are, do eventually rather back her into a corner.
Then a major shift was prompted by her visit to Egypt at the end of 1979. She was struck by the unvarying, limited palette employed by the Ancient Egyptian painter but, rather than simply appropriating it in toto, she set about recreating her own version of it from memory, devising a group of beautiful, intense, relatively mellow colours. This emphasis on a given range of colours engendered a significant change in the form of her paintings. Even though she employed a very strict format of vertical stripes, she seemed to use colour in a more flexible, freer way.
In optical terms this serves to render the painting more user-friendly. Whereas previously, our eyes had been kept firmly at a distance, with no way of grasping the totality of a composition, and no privileged access to a pictorial space, from this point on Riley allows the possibility of such a space to flourish, and with it the possibility of our grasping an overall structure. All this applies in relative terms to what might be termed her "Egyptian" paintings, which are extremely beautiful, austere and generous, and rate among her finest achievements.
The next major step unmistakably consolidated the trend.
By cutting the vertical stripes with diagonals, she generated a latticework that quite dramatically broke down the relentless order of uniform stripes. These compositions allowed dappled effects that evoke her early black-and-white patterns with only the faintest residual traces of the optical discomfort associated with the earlier work. She keeps our eyes moving, but the optical fields they are spurred on to negotiate are extremely pleasant places to be, with more spatial potential.
There are also more associations with spaces and places in some of the titles. Lagoon I broadens things out even further by incorporating curvilinear elements in the vertical and diagonal patterning, and leads on to the most recent development, which entails a pronounced emphasis on the curvilinear in large-scale compositions featuring large areas of uninterrupted colour.
In an interview with John Tusa, she remarked that her wartime experience as a child in relatively primitive conditions in a cottage in Cornwall gave her "the confidence that one can make something out of very little". That could be her motto. At every stage she has worked ingeniously with an exceptionally limited range of material and formal means in pursuit of something intangible and elusive: "the thing that refuses to be thought", as she once phrased it. Her rigour and intelligence have produced a wonderful, consistently stimulating bodyof work.
• Bridget Riley is at Tate Britain in London until September 28th, admission £8.50. Bridget Riley, New Prints and Gouaches is at the Green on Red Gallery, Dublin until Aug 30th (01-6713414)
