First principles
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
Another essential exhibition in Oxford: after Tim Scott's sculpture at the Modern Museum, a sizeable group of Bridget Riley's drawings, 1961 to 1967, at the Bear Lane Gallery, to be shown subsequently at Nottingham and Bristol. They point to an odd situation so far as under- standing of this artist's work is concerned : it's spirit and precise intention.
When Riley won the International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1968 there had been no exhibition of her paintings in London since 1963. In this vacuum, Riley is now a household name, representing some kind of pop-art razzle-da77.le conveyed by a tough physical assault on the bewildered retina. This impression is nourished by trivialised imagery, stemming only vaguely from her work, and blazes away in shop window displays, in posters, or in the guise of dress fabrics. The exploitation has receded but the damage is done. A persistent aware- ness of Riley and what she is supposed to represent bear little relation to her largely unknown work.
Commitments to shows abroad have not allowed the public here to follow the serial- like progressions within differing groups of formal themes developed by Riley with ex- emplary lucidity. Her ideas are first explored in drawings that are either complete studies or sectional plans for paintings; the consequent slowness with which paintings are released from the studio, wherever their destination, sustains an elusive identity.
There is no mystique implied in all this. Other artists are equally measured, just as scrupulous; many artists make meticulous nota- tions for paintings; everyone has his boss shots. What is useful to understand, here is that Riley's paintings are not just logically en- larged transferences on to canvas of drastically simple juxtapositions among smaller basic shapes, dots or lines in rhythmic movement first set out on paper in neat little sectional patterns. Her paintings are acts of imagination in precisely the same way as a Mondrian or a Botticelli.
They have a deceptive ease and simplicity about them (but only at first glance) because of their great clarity and refinement; above all, because of their insistence in concentrating without digression upon the full implications of one particular principle at a time. In this sense what Riley does turns from a formal exercise into a romantic visual poem. for what this principle yields up in each case is astonish- ing in terms of interior dialogue, expressed by a wholly unexpected range of disclosures re- lating to colour, light, slow or fast speed, spatial thrust into or away from the surface, and the spill over into virgin white areas of warmth or coldness from adjacent but sharply constrained strips of pure colour.
Imagine a painting consisting of an alternat- ing vertical zigzag filling the entire canvas laterally, the zigzag bounded on one side by a thin blue line, on the other by a red line of the same width. The .lower horizontal set of white V spaces bounded by red will appear at a distance to be rosily warm: the upper row, bounded by blue, to be icily cold. Identi- cal whites, by the optically implied flooding in each case from the warmth of red or the coldness of blue, are forced into emphatic opposition with the same dramatic impact as two contrasting colours.
We must hope for a comprehensive ex- hibition in London very soon of all Riley's paintings in chronology, with the relevant working drawings. In the meantime, those at Oxford, though far from complete, are helpful indications of the artist's purpose. Beautiful in themselves, they trace a transition from ex- tremely varied interplays of black and white through to warm and cold greys, rendered in modulation from brownish grey to other in- flections of a bluish grey: but still a range of greys to the most intent stare, from dark to light.
They yield up shimmering areas of pure cool blue or the palest, most delicate pink at certain climaxes in the warmth or coldness of grey. This penultimate arrival at colour in the accepted sense can be observed most beautifully in four new silk-screen prints, to be found also at the Rowan Gallery. Later draw- ings show a concern for vermilion and tur- quoise which moves from its pure state to dull brown or leaden grey as the colour constricts into narrower bands. In dealing with colour, I have not attempted to describe the variations in shape, structure, and movement in all the drawings.
Pencilled indications outside many of the studies indicate whether, on the resultant can- vas, the 'movement' is to be contained inside the painting or to infer development outside. These refer to what the final scale will .produce, optically, rather than to fragmenta- tion or wholeness; if you look at the centre of a painting something else happens in terms ,of haziness of focus and diminution of light at the extremities of your vision. This 'event' can be trapped as a series of structural intensi- fications or convergences in an extended paint- ing.
The scale of each painting is obviously crucial and gives Riley the hardest problems, so far resolved with telling exactness. The drawings at Oxford can be considered, fanci- fully, as Japanese paper pellets seen enlarged under a microscope before they are transformed by water into those magical flowers—so spec- tacular are the changes which occur, amount- ing to metamorphosis, when Riley's drawings are carried through into paintings.
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