RENG-MC 1984

Victor Vasarely made this painting, RENG-MC, with bold colors and hard edges, exploring what happens when the flat becomes illusionistically three-dimensional. I imagine Vasarely setting out, plotting a field of red rectangles on a blue grid, only to disrupt it with a curve, a bulge, a sense of depth. Did he feel like he was playing God, bending reality? Or was he revealing the hidden dimensions all around us? There’s something so determined about the repetition, yet so playful in the distortion. It's like he’s saying, "I can control this, but I choose to let it go wild." The optical illusion vibrates. The contrast between the red and blue is cranked up to full volume, and everything seems to pulse and shift before your eyes. These kinds of paintings sit within a longer trajectory: think of Josef Albers, Bridget Riley, artists who are all fascinated with perception, color, and the way we see. Vasarely invites us to question what we think we know, to embrace the instability of vision and the joy of visual experience.