.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Begun in 1956 and finished twenty years later, Victor Vasarely’s Yabla is a captivating investigation of the diptych as form—a consideration of the nature of symmetry that is as conceptually playful as it is visually exciting. Rendered in black, white and blue-grey, Vasarely’s spiralling patterns are realised with a stylish, clinical minimalism that allows the complex interrelation of his forms to be explored with clarity—yet despite the apparent simplicity of this minimalistic style, the work seems t o continually elude the eye. There is a sensation of depth and space that flickers in and out of focus, our sense of the painting’s architectural structure scrambled by the alterations in thickness of Vasarely's lines, as fields of pattern seem to tessellate neatly, only to disarmingly give way to new dimensional realities. Meanwhile, forms appear from the modulation of colour, as a circle and a larger geometric shape seem to hover, filtering light over the painting, with their outline only implied by the tonal shifts Vasarely subjects his lines to. These interlocking forces of shape, colour and line combine to produce a sensation of movement that is at once illusionistic and powerfully kinetic.
With each panel a mirror image of the other in both colour and form, Vasarely carries out an almost mathematical examination of his inverted panels, his work underpinned by the equilibrium between the two. Yet for Vasarely, this kind of equality of image had resonances beyond the merely formal. Within the simple formal elegance of his patterns, the artist envisioned an egalitarian model for the organisation of society and life itself, a clear and precise visual language that would not only be interpreted and understood across society, irrespective of one’s education or training, but that also centred the viewer as a co-creator of the work—after all, it was only in the viewer’s eye that the kinetic effects central to his work could take place. In this sense then symmetry for Vasarely was not only a source of formal power; it was also a metaphor for the way in which he wished his art to work in society at large.
With each panel a mirror image of the other in both colour and form, Vasarely carries out an almost mathematical examination of his inverted panels, his work underpinned by the equilibrium between the two. Yet for Vasarely, this kind of equality of image had resonances beyond the merely formal. Within the simple formal elegance of his patterns, the artist envisioned an egalitarian model for the organisation of society and life itself, a clear and precise visual language that would not only be interpreted and understood across society, irrespective of one’s education or training, but that also centred the viewer as a co-creator of the work—after all, it was only in the viewer’s eye that the kinetic effects central to his work could take place. In this sense then symmetry for Vasarely was not only a source of formal power; it was also a metaphor for the way in which he wished his art to work in society at large.