Méandre IV 1959

Victor Vasarely made Méandre IV using a hard edge technique, probably a screen print. There’s something about the way Vasarely uses a stark black and white palette with these perfectly clean lines that just stops you in your tracks. The geometry here is so precise that it almost feels like a blueprint, and I imagine he was drawing these lines with a very precise implement. If you look closely at the white lines, you can see that each one is carefully placed to create this optical illusion of a figure emerging from the background. They are not straight, they appear to ‘meander’ creating diamond and arrow shapes. This reminds me of Bridget Riley's stripe paintings, but where she creates movement using colour, Vasarely teases our vision using the interplay of positive and negative space, which gives it such a cool, detached, almost futuristic feel. Art is nothing if not a big conversation!