LLEI D'ART 14

Bridget Riley’sdifferent gaze The Courtauld Gallery (London) Until the 17th January 2016 G. Bridget LouiseRiley (Norwood, UK, 1931) is a notable Englishpainter whosemainworthhas been to create com- plex abstract configurations capable of giving the viewer optical illusions. That is to say,mirages thatmake us perceive different forms of reality in a completely involuntaryway. Riley is considered a revolutionary of psychedelic art, able to take our imagination to the apparently impossible. Thedaughter of aprinter, during theWar she lived inCornwall andwent on to study painting at theRoyal College of Art. Highly influencedbyGeorgesSeurat’s pointillism, Riley’s importance is essentially down to her contribution to the development of optical art, adiscipline that questions the perceptionof reality by subjecting it to aspects such as visual acuity, colour, formor theperspective of what is being observed. In the 1960s she stoodout for her obsessively repetitive abstract geometricpatterns, aswell as for her powerful black andwhite contrasts. Shedid not begin to use colour until the early 1970s, which increased the sense of movement inher pictures. Bridget Riley. Cortesía/CourtesyCourtauldGallery Riley insists andpersists on the enigma of colour and its irresistible splendour in the light of a luminescence that seems to liquidate and redouble it in awaterfall of shades that deceive the human eye. The temporary Learning fromSeurat exhibition at the ever-experimental CourtauldGallery inLondon (onuntil the 17th January 2016) brings us anoctogenarianBridget that shares a spacewith theNeo-Impressionist Georges- PierreSeurat (1859-1891). She, with sevenof her works andSeurat with TheBridge at Courbevoie , an iconicwork that was somethingof a startingpoint for theBritish artist in1959 and her creationof geometricpatterns that have turnedher into an art world celebrity. The copy shemade of Seurat’swork remains inher private collection and it is nowon show in this exhibition as a kindof keystone of what Riley andSeurat had in common: they both used art as a kindof optical science. She tried to understand howpointillismwas able toboost the complementary nature of the colours, and so shebegan to create her own pointillist landscapeswhen she created Tremor in 1961, a vibrant and convulsive abstract painting that revealed the shining creativeperiod the artist was having at the time, so absorbed in colour andperception. 37