Victor Vasarely worked through the medium of paint and printmaking. He is considered an instigator to the op-art movement, and produced essential contributions to the field between 1953 and 1984.
Vasarely used warped perspective, to produce optical illusory paintings that tricked the mind of the viewer into thinking it is perceiving a different shape. In ‘Vegaball’ he paints square shapes in ascending and descending size as if they were contoured over a sphere. Vasarely gives the appearance of a floating grid of squares, with four spheres pushing forward and warping the individual squares in the grid. Though the painting is flat and untextured, it suggests to the viewer a sense of space within the artwork. Through this use of shape, he manages to create tension, a visual friction, like the squares are being stretched tightly over four balloons. During the 1970s Vasarely experimented with this style of stretched shapes in many of his other works including ‘Globe’, ‘Vega-Multi’, and ‘Bakk’.
Generally I don’t like Vasarely’s work. I don’t like the precision and rigidity of his paintings, though I understand that these are characteristics essential to his style. There’s something not quite right with his colour schemes in certain pieces, such as in ‘Vega-Multi’ where his use of pastels and muted colours, next to the bright primary colours look too jarring for my liking. I feel the some of the colours clash and look dated today, though evidently at the time the work was groundbreaking. I think Vasarely was ahead of his time, as many of his painstakingly produced paintings look like works made using modern computer technology such as photoshop. Because of this fact I don’t think Vasarely’s work is as powerful today as it would have been at the time it was made.
If I were to use some of Vasarely’s techniques in my own work, I’d most likely use his contoured line techniques seen in his earlier work. Perhaps one stripe in my next piece can be taken up by linework similar to those used in ‘Venus’ above, where lines veer off in angles that distort shape. I could also emulate the technique used in ‘Zebra’ where curved lines are used like contours to represent the shape of an object.
Charlotte Formosa : Fine Art 