Making Waves

By ROBERT HUGHES

Of all the short-lived "movements" that agitated the surface of art in the 1960s, Op art had the briefest life. What became of all those eye-teasing patterns, those blips and dazzles and other paraphernalia of quick-shot visual illusion? Gone, mostly: either degenerating into unctuously chic decor--as with European artists like Yaacov Agam or, in his late work, Victor Vasarely--or vanishing into that limbo of taste where obsolete experiments go. Today's supergraphics wrap tomorrow's garbage.

Apart from the Venezuelan artist Jesus-Raphael Soto, only one of the painters on whom the Op label was stuck ten years ago seems to have really developed, continuing to produce work of the utmost seriousness. She is an Englishwoman named Bridget Riley, whose first New York show in seven years opened last week at the Sidney Janis Gallery.

Unstable Focus. Precision is its keynote; but then, Riley is an epitome of that, both in her art and in her rigorous, gently ironic address to life. A slender woman of 44, she lives alone, dividing her time between a house in London's Holland Park, a studio in Cornwall ("Cornwall is full of artists and I manage to avoid nearly all of them," she says with glee), and a second studio in the Vaucluse district of Southern France, not far from the ruins of the Marquis de Sade's castle at La Coste. A second-generation Londoner, she has in her family tree a grandfather who worked with Edison on the invention of the light bulb and a great-uncle who was a founding member of the socialist Fabian Society: a background of cold baths and emancipated thought, transmitted to her by a mother whom Riley describes as "well read, unconventional, very much a product of the new world for women of the 1920s, and always willing to rethink attitudes on orthodox or accepted issues."

Not surprisingly, then, Riley grew up untroubled by the ideological flak that now surrounds women's art in America, and rejects the idea of a "feminist" art. "Women's liberation," she declared a few years ago, "when applied to artists, seems to me to be a naive concept."

A decade ago, when she first showed her work in the U.S., Riley's paintings were almost synonymous with visual assault. Black elliptical dots on a white ground, arranged in a grid but turning fractionally to set up an irritating instability of focus; parallel stripes whose wavy motion produced something akin to seasickness. Ever since her art-student days in London, Riley had been fascinated with patterns based on repeated units: the dots in Seurat's paintings, the balance of delicate strains between Mondrian's squares.

What especially interested her was the way an internal pattern could be made to work against its larger structure--Pisan Romanesque architecture, for instance, in which the complicated inlays and bands of black-and-white marble conspire to deny the overall shape of a fagade. This crystallized itself for her one day in Venice in 1960, as she watched a violent rain squall sweeping across the inlaid pavement of a piazza. The drops, filming the surface with water splashes, broke up the stone pattern, returning it briefly to chaos and instability. Could this breakup not be given an equivalent as painting? It could; and that sense of disturbed equilibrium within what looks like a rigid serial structure was to be the essential "subject" of Riley's work from then on.

Strong Illusion. Riley's paintings, especially the recent ones with their finely tuned ribbons of color, suffer in reproduction: full scale--up to 8 ft. wide--is needed for their effect, which is to deny one's point of focus. You cannot stare at any one point on a Riley for long. It slides away and is lost in the shimmer. A painting like Shih-Li, 1975, sets up an undulation of space that one feels as a physical pressure. The illusion is so strong that no act of will can get rid of it.

There is nothing undisclosed in Riley's paintings. All their components are there, and visible, down to the last small bend of a stripe. There are no accidental effects. Like Vasarely, Riley prefers to have her work done by assistants from a preplanned sketch, with every color shift worked out in advance. Yet the way the paintings work on the eye is unpredictable, and almost baffles analysis. As Art Critic Bryan Robertson put it, "We are creatures of habit and rarely fully stretched. Riley's paintings are alive with potentiality; they disrupt visual complacency and do not provide us with any opportunity for evasion or rest."

Yet they are not merely an ocular gymnasium. There is a lyrical side to Ri ley's work. The color, in particular, is taxingly subtle. It does not woo the eye, but it does present an unexpectedly wide range of situations, from a slow, impalpable, pearly shimmer of greens and grays to the sharp, exhilarating flicker and reversal of green against red against blue in such paintings as Paean, 1973.

One is tempted to read Riley's color as light, mixed and reflected in the white spaces between the stripes--but it is a highly constructed, finished sort of light, unrelated to nature. "My pictures need time to develop on the retina," says Riley. "The first contact is always a bit off-putting and abrasive. You have to go with it. It's like taking a cold shower: a shock at first, but then it feels good."

What lies on the other side of that shock is, in fact, an unusually generous display of pictorial intelligence.

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