TER-OLTAR 1973 - 1974

This is Vasarely’s TER-OLTAR, and you know, I can almost feel his hand guiding the paint across the surface, plotting each of those bulging forms. Imagine him there, wrestling with the tension between flat space and the illusion of depth—pushing and pulling, adding and subtracting until those orbs start to vibrate! I wonder if he was thinking about the conversations between color when he made this? The electric zing between the blues, reds, and greens? Those colors don’t sit still! Each one is buzzing. The surface itself is so smooth, almost machine-made, yet you feel this human impulse behind the order of the composition. It’s like he's playing with the idea of the grid, expanding and contracting it. Painters are always chatting with each other—across time. We’re always trying to solve similar problems, pushing painting this way and that. Each artwork builds on the last, creating a conversation about how we see and experience the world. Anyway, I find it interesting that fixed and definitive readings of paintings don't exist.