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Lot Essay
Having concentrated on the complex black and white forms that characterised her Op art work of the 1960s, in the early 1970s Riley made the all-important move into colour. Painted in 1972, Arcane is one of the finest works from this important period of transition and one that clearly indicates the new direction that Riley's work would take.
"The reasoning of my black and white work could not be extended into colour because it depended on a contradiction between stability and disruption." Riley has explained about the problems facing her during this time. "I had to find a new basis and for a long time this eluded me, which was extremely blind of me, because I had already copied Seurat, and that should have told me certain things. But I had to wait about seven or eight years before I re-understood what I had actually been through. I saw that the basis of colour is its instability. Instead of searching for a firm foundation, I realised I had one in the very opposite. That was solid ground again so to speak, and by accepting this paradox I could begin to work with the fleeting, the elusive, with those things which disappear when you actually apply your attention hard and fast - and so a whole, huge area of activity opened up for me. It was through this that I found out what I was looking at. What you focus on is not what you see, at least not in terms of colour. I realised that what I was working with lay just outside the centre of attention. One looks here and colour is there. It's almost as though colour has no integral core or centre of its own. This, as you can imagine, was a huge discovery." (Bridget Riley in conversation with Michael Craig-Martin, "Practising Abstraction" reproduced in Bridget Riley : Dialogues on Art ed. Robert Kudielka, London, 1995, p. 56.)
Consisting of a deceptively simple geometric design of near vertical stripes of only four alternating colours, Arcane generates a luminescent sense of warm radiating colour that seems not only to be alive on the picture plane, but also to be active and constantly shifting from one place to another. The painting visually illustrates Riley's observation that "What you focus on is not what you see." Using a technique (and indeed a colour range) that can be seen to have derived from Seurat, the colour of this work is not to be found in the colours that Riley has actually painted but is captured and exposed as existing somewhere in between them. This essentially hidden quality of the colour of the work is possibly the explanation of its cryptic title.
"The reasoning of my black and white work could not be extended into colour because it depended on a contradiction between stability and disruption." Riley has explained about the problems facing her during this time. "I had to find a new basis and for a long time this eluded me, which was extremely blind of me, because I had already copied Seurat, and that should have told me certain things. But I had to wait about seven or eight years before I re-understood what I had actually been through. I saw that the basis of colour is its instability. Instead of searching for a firm foundation, I realised I had one in the very opposite. That was solid ground again so to speak, and by accepting this paradox I could begin to work with the fleeting, the elusive, with those things which disappear when you actually apply your attention hard and fast - and so a whole, huge area of activity opened up for me. It was through this that I found out what I was looking at. What you focus on is not what you see, at least not in terms of colour. I realised that what I was working with lay just outside the centre of attention. One looks here and colour is there. It's almost as though colour has no integral core or centre of its own. This, as you can imagine, was a huge discovery." (Bridget Riley in conversation with Michael Craig-Martin, "Practising Abstraction" reproduced in Bridget Riley : Dialogues on Art ed. Robert Kudielka, London, 1995, p. 56.)
Consisting of a deceptively simple geometric design of near vertical stripes of only four alternating colours, Arcane generates a luminescent sense of warm radiating colour that seems not only to be alive on the picture plane, but also to be active and constantly shifting from one place to another. The painting visually illustrates Riley's observation that "What you focus on is not what you see." Using a technique (and indeed a colour range) that can be seen to have derived from Seurat, the colour of this work is not to be found in the colours that Riley has actually painted but is captured and exposed as existing somewhere in between them. This essentially hidden quality of the colour of the work is possibly the explanation of its cryptic title.