Relief Metal 1960

This is Victor Vasarely’s ‘Relief Metal,’ and looking at it, I’m immediately struck by its crispness, the way it balances flat shapes into a kind of optical playground. It’s all about simple forms, circles mostly, arranged in a grid, but it feels like something is about to happen. There’s something almost industrial about the feel of this print. You can imagine these shapes being stamped out on a production line and it is all about the relationship between positive and negative space, figure and ground. Think about how the white shapes seem to push forward, while the black recedes. It’s like a dance, and I love how a single, solid black circle sits right at the top, anchoring everything. Vasarely played a lot with perception, and you can see it here. It reminds me a little of Bridget Riley and her exploration of Op Art, but Vasarely brings something different, a kind of playful seriousness. There's a lot of conversations going on between different artists and different types of work, isn't there? Anyway, that’s what I see, but what do *you* see?