BLAZE 1 - Bridget Riley - 1962

[Michael Grove]

Emulsion on board - 43” x 43” - complex in origin.

PERCEPTION IS THE MEDIUM

" Widespread among human habits is the perception

that we are human beings having a spiritual (consciousness) experience. We need to turn that perception on its head. We are beings of consciousness, living in a realm of information and having a material experience – not just a human one, but an experience of participating in the entirety of material creation.

The universe is continually generating fresh knowledge of itself, creating new structure and new relationships. So too are we – embedded in it, and it embedded in us." 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Jon Freeman

" I have never studied optics and my use of mathematics is rudimentary and confined to such things as equalizing, halving, quartering and simple progressions  ... I have never made use of scientific theory or scientific data, though I am well aware that the contemporary psyche can manifest startling parallels on the frontier between the ARTS and the SCIENCES." 

                                                                                             Bridget Riley

" Nevertheless, the relationship between science and art is particularly thrown into relief by Riley's form of painting, which reduces the material evidences of personal involvement to a minimum in the interests of an objective evaluation of the interaction of the energies inherent in the related lines, colours and shapes, and uses calculated intervals, frequencies and elements, in such a way that there might at times appear to be a resemblance to scientific diagrams. 

Further, it is frequently demonstrating principles which, though they may not be defined, are nevertheless as evident as the physical laws that underlie scientific enquiry and deduction. But it is not so much the apparently scientific detachment that worries the average spectator, as the apparent remoteness of the artist from the process of materialization, the feeling that the works might be produced by machines."

                                                                                Maurice de Sausmarez

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First posted by Michael Grove @zaadz on March 5, 2007 at 16:30

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[Michael Grove]

PERCEPTION IS indeed THE MEDIUM

Bridget Riley is about the changes - progressive, sometimes abrupt, sometimes apparently disastrous - that can take place in a given situation.

The situation is presented in the simplest possible terms

            John Russell - Sunday Times - September 1963

 

One of the most distinctive characteristics of Bridget Riley's art is that it "insists" with such concentration that it changes sensory response into something else.

The experience which Riley offers is closely related to the expression of emotion or, more exactly, to the creation of visual analogues for sharply particularized states of
mind.

The very intensity of the assault which her painting makes on the eye drives it, as it were, past the point at which it is merely a matter of optical effect.

It becomes acute physical sensation, apprehended kinesthetically as mental tension or mental release, anxiety or exhileration, heightened self-awareness or heightened awareness of unfamiliar or even alien states of being.

Bridget Riley

Catalogue introduction - David Thompson
Venice Biennale, June 1968