Orion-K 1972

Victor Vasarely made 'Orion-K', a kind of chromatic maze, using who knows what! It's all these nested squares, right? Some are like, colored outlines, and others are solid. It's this push-pull thing he's got going on that makes it feel like the whole thing is breathing, kind of expanding and contracting at the same time. Look at how the blocks of color move from warmer reds and yellows to cooler blues and greens. There's this great optical trickery, like Vasarely’s messing with our depth perception. That red square, there, seems to jump out, while that blue one recedes. It's like he's painting pure sensation, or the feeling of form itself, not just how things look. Vasarely’s playing a game with Josef Albers' ideas about how colors interact, but he's also laying the groundwork for artists like Bridget Riley, who took this optical, sensory approach and ran with it. In the end, there are no right answers, just a bunch of open-ended questions.