Kartchou 1976

Here is a painting made by Victor Vasarely called Kartchou; you can almost feel the artist carefully plotting each form. I imagine Vasarely, with his ruler and paint, building this landscape of color and shape one step at a time. The surface is alive with a hallucinatory rainbow—shifting and undulating like you're looking into some kind of weird funhouse mirror. It makes me think about how we look at things, how our eyes play tricks on us. Vasarely's earlier works are like, ‘What if art could move?’ You know? Like, what if it could trick your eye into seeing movement, even when it’s perfectly still? There is a back-and-forth exchange across time. I wonder what he would have thought of Bridget Riley’s work. Or vice versa? One thing for sure is that artists are always talking to each other, even across generations.