Vasarely

A tapestry of faces ripples and winks across Thomas Bayrle’s Vasarely, 1965, an homage to the pioneering Op artist Victor Vasarely, famed for his canvases of hypnotic, undulating colour. Bayrle has cited Vasarely as a key influence, and in his kaleidoscopic tribute, optical waves emerge from a grid of miniature heads, each adorned in a bright, cartoonish outfit. At the foreground, Bayrle has sculpted a relief portrait of Vasarely, gazing in profile at the tessellating pixelation. A key work painted in 1965, Vasarely was included in the artist’s solo presentation Thomas Bayrle: Diria que ja no som a Kansas, at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, as well as in his 2013 survey exhibition at WIELS Brussels and Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples. During the late 1950s, Bayrle apprenticed in a weaving factory, an experience he referred to as an ‘undergrowth of warp and weft’ and whose legacy can be seen in the tightly-knit composition of Vasarely (T. Bayrle, quoted in M. Schwendener, ‘This Artist Foresaw Our Digital Future in a Meadow of Dandelions’, New York Times, June 2018). The textile motif also undergirds the artist’s invented concept of the ‘superform’, a term he coined to describe the sculptural quality of his paintings, in which he multiplies single images, distorting each slightly to produce another three-dimensional element. For Bayrle, ‘repetition is the source of life and art’, evident in the self-referential forms of Vasarely (T. Bayrle, in conversation with O. Laric, Mousse 36, December 2012 - January 2013. Uniting the physical profile of Vasarely with the illusion of sculptural depth, the present work is a striking encapsulation of Bayrle’s signature motif, and a prescient representation of an atomised world.