It was a journey of discovering the wonder of one of my favourite artists, Bridget Riley, whose works were curated in Hayward Gallery in London in 2019. Purely from the perspective of ‘seeing’ itself, I found abstract art was particularly evocative. Geometrics objectifies the rhythm of nature through the lens of visual sensations with composition in simplicity, conveying single-minded messages without any predisposed definition and indication.
As a thinking artist doubles as phenomenologist, Bridget Riley is more likely to practice on entity than feeling artists via either painting or writing. The philosophy we have leant from her works could refer to the worldview of phenomenology — a scientific but non-clinical study of consciousness including perception, judgement and emotion. In other words, it is all about ‘how things feel’.
“At the core of colour is a paradox. It is simultaneously one thing and several things — you can never see colour by itself, it is always affected by other colours.” — Bridget Riley, 2009
The connection with her at the very moment of looking at her works in the gallery hall that I found was ‘colour’. “We usually see colour as the colour of something — it is not a natural thing to see colour simply as itself alone, unless, of course, we happen also to be painters,” she said. So, what if we can try to see colour as just colour? Riley’s works compose of several geometrical shapes like bands, strips, triangles, rectangles, circles, diagonals and curves, which allows us to see the subtle and dynamic differences between various arrays, proximities, combinations and the sizes of the canvases, or even observe the unhinged flash of hallucination generated through the glance of grid-like monochromatic elements. A colour is theoretically coded with a sequence however could be perceived variously — we can sense the shifting on a spectrum of hue, saturation and brightness under the interference of the peripheral colours. In plain language, the defined ‘sky blue’ might be perceived or felt differently in diverse structures or by individuals.
Riley has created a series of paintings as a vehicle for viewers to experience this colour effect. Gazing at these paintings, I was trying to understand the signals of the complex configurations. Four from a group known as ‘rhomboid’ paintings installed in the second room particularly elicited my excitement. I noticed the patterns in which complementary colours generally sit next to each other, activating the optical reciprocity of advancing and receding colours to add extra dimension and versatile tonality in terms of the hue scale. What I had observed is the interactions among the shades while the diagonal counterparts create chaotic balance, I realised that Riley’s intention of producing these paintings was to invite people to enter her works by just looking at the entity which is colour. Before that, Black and White was retrospected to be examined as a primitive approach — proximities of dots and lines that give vibration in a more direct way. Tremor, created in 1962, composes of a grid of interlocking black and white equilateral triangles with some of them having one convex side outward or inward. This work generates optical effects to turn the flats to superimposed planes, which is known as illusion as a biological phenomenon of our sensations deceived by our brains during perception in terms of depth, colour, motion or structure.
As wondering how the static ones can vibrantly deliver a such psychedelic effect, I stepped in a room that featured all the scripts illustrating the precise calculations as preparations. It exhibited the process of Riley’s creations where I realised how the magic of her works has come all the way through the sketches on papers to the real-scaled canvases.
“The working process is one of discovery and it is worth remembering that the word discovery implies an uncovering of that which is hidden.” — Bridget Riley, 2019
No doubt that all the studies before producing artworks are rigorous. It is misconception that artists are consciously intuitive with inborn talent of aesthetic sensibility and skills. Every piece of work is developed over time into a result of exercise of judgement and numerous decisions about all respects. It may seem beyond our visual grasp to have an epiphany by cursorily looking at a single piece, so instead we should be guiding ourselves by asking why the artist has made the choices of the material, scale, form, colour, tone and structure.
Riley as a thinker equipped herself with these artistic devices, attempting to enable sensation-provoking interactions with her audience. In her exhibition, we are no longer talking about the concrete and tangible figures vividly illustrated in a narrative, but exploring the immediate feeling and further perceptual processing during observation. Merely speaking, we just need to ask ourselves how it feels.
Apart from the obsession of geometrical and abstract art, I found intellectual stimulation embedded in Riley’s works that have made profound impacts. In fact, there is no differences among what we are doing as professions. Inspired by Riley, I introspectively perceived myself as a ‘thinking designer’ who possesses the ability of verbal expression that could complement my graphic communication. It is not an onerous task for me to articulate how a visual, object, figure or phenomena feels. More precisely, I am capable of encoding rationales into visual languages, and creating a port that could creatively transmit to my audience — it is so-called creative solution. Convincingly, both of artists and designers from their perspectives are seeking solutions to the chaos around the world that may defer from cultures and eras.
Few weeks later, I revisited all the exhibited works through a mental journey, wondering when to see those masterworks in person again.
