Bridget Riley - art of a different stripe

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Bridget Riley's new show in London presents stripe paintings from every decade of her career

At the current Matisse exhibition at Tate Modern, a wall text gives Matisse’s comment that the white background to his cut-out The Parakeet and the Mermaid lends the work ‘a rare and intangible quality’. The same could be said for the white stripes that appear amongst the coloured ones in a number of the stripe paintings at Bridget Riley’s current show at the David Zwirner Gallery in Grafton Street.

The show is dedicated to stripe paintings from across Riley’s long career, from the small, monochrome Horizontal Vibration (1961) from early in the artist’s ‘Op art’ period, to the very recent,  massive, diptych Red Modulation (Yellow and Orange) (2013–14). The use of white is mostly seen in the earlier paintings, from the late 1960s to early 1970s, though the dates show that many of these have been reworked at a later date, so for instance Elysium is dated as 2003/1973. This indicates the importance of the earlier work to the artist, as well as the inherent continuity of her practice.

Anyone unfamiliar with Riley's work might think that her whole career had been devoted to the stripe; in fact the variety of her work is one of its most impressive features. In over 50 years, Riley has never run out of ideas. When the first stripe paintings appeared in the late 1960s, they must have been unexpected by those familiar with her previous work. In 1963, the British critic Nigel Gosling had written of Riley’s work that it was ‘perhaps the ultimate in abstraction – pure retinal sensation divorced from form or content – and by definition a dead end, though it is impressively reached by Bridget Riley’.

Gosling must have been taken by surprise, to say the least, when the stripe paintings began to appear. This was not an abandonment of Riley’s earlier interests but a development of them. White is much less apparent in the early stripe paintings than it had been in many of Riley’s Op paintings, yet like Matisse, she evidently found it valuable for obtaining a certain ‘intangible’ quality. Curiously, it seems to form a ‘background’ to these paintings even though there is far less of it than of the coloured stripes that appear to dominate. Yet its presence is vital and does, in fact, reveal a certain continuity with the more overt ‘optical’ effects of the earlier monochromes.

If you stand fairly close to Late Morning 1 (1967), a painting of vertical stripes, and focus on a spot at about the centre of the painting, and then walk backwards (there is plenty of room for this) while keeping your focus steady, you will see a ‘diamond’ shaped ‘border’ appearing at the extremities of the painting – and of your vision. A similar effect happens with this work’s horizontal counterpart, Late Morning (Horizontal) (1969). No such effect is visible with the stripe paintings that do not have a white ‘background’.

One feels that this reveals in a most immediate fashion what Matisse meant by the power of white to evoke the ‘rare and intangible’. It is not that one is conscious of this strange effect while looking normally at these canvases, but rather that there is an energy embedded in them that one senses in some subliminal fashion. The ‘focus and walk backwards’ trick reveals that this energy is not in one’s imagination – it is actually there on the canvas and the intense white of the ‘background’ of these works is an element of its production. One feels that Matisse would have recognized this.

Yet later paintings here make little or no use of white. This is certainly not to say that they are static or lacking in energy. In Après Midi (1981) the few white stripes seem to be foreground not background, and burn with bright intensity while the other colours seem to shimmer or vibrate as they try to compete. In still later work, white disappears. It would seem that other sources of energy, subtler but still powerful, are employed in such works as Arioso (Blue) (2013) or Red Modulation (2014-13), where individual, carefully placed stripes have a brilliance that allows them to take over the energizing role of white.

So what will a new audience think of these paintings? While in the gallery on the opening day, I was struck by the number of young people coming in. These are people for whom even the 1980s are a distant historical period. Many would be seeing even the older works for the first time. They are a generation brought up surrounded by the moving image: the all-day, multi-channel TV, video games, moving adverts and news broadcasts on screens in the street or station, or held in the palm of the hand. Yet here they are, looking curiously about them, to see how visual energy can be caught on a canvas and the excitement of vision – surely our greatest gift – explored and celebrated.