Majus-Vit 1974

Victor Vasarely created this image with paint, where squares interact, floating in and out of focus on a dark ground. What a trip! It makes my eyes go all squishy. I can imagine him working on it, one square at a time, carefully plotting the perspective to create this illusion of depth, the colors popping against that black background. It almost feels like he is trying to create a mathematical equation with color. I wonder if he was listening to music while painting? Was he feeling calm and collected, or perhaps a little obsessive? There's something almost dizzying, but also kind of soothing, about the repetition and the precision. Vasarely and other Op artists were definitely onto something, pushing painting into new realms of perception and abstraction, and inspiring a lot of other artists to think outside the box…or, in this case, maybe inside a whole bunch of them.