Bridget Riley: Learn to See Review – Visual Mastery Leaves You Gasping for Air | Bridget Riley

SSometimes a smaller gallery is more effective than a comprehensive survey. Bridget Riley: Learning to Watch at Margate’s Turner Contemporary brings us a lively and enchanting collection, featuring 26 works from the 1960s to the present and moving between large canvases, studies and works painted directly on the wall. Learning to see focuses the mind and sharpens the eye.

Riley’s paintings come to you all at once. They arrest you and they are still you. The longer she looked, the more she revealed and the more she seemed to change. The more they get trapped, the more useful they become. “How do you do that?”, That might be the first thought. How are the colors arranged and what is the logic of their construction? But there are also the things you do with your nervous system, in that unknown gap between eye and brain, between perception and its image. The color values ​​in Dancing to the Music of Time (2022), a large wall drawing originally designed for a museum in Canberra, darken as you first approach, until each painted disc begins to glow with a silvery undertone. When you compare colors, you can’t remember the last color when you get to the next one. I pinball back and forth, getting lost in the music. Angel, a smaller wall painting, has discs whose stately rotational alignment has the kind of brevity, clear simplicity and inevitability of some of Erik Satie’s piano phrases. It’s simple. It’s complicated. It’s mesmerizing.

As you approach and retreat, you can become trapped in Rayleigh systems and logic. No matter how analytical you try to be, they keep doing things to you on a physical and superficial level. We are not accountants of optics, and Rayleigh reminds us that we are objects in space, perceiving the world. Through the balcony window, there is a horizon between sea and sky. On the opposite wall, Riley’s horizons continue to multiply. Pin them and they go away.

These are not eye tests. Riley makes you look, and not just at the things she draws. The 94-year-old artist makes you acutely aware of the prolongation and compression of time. Where you stand or sit, how you approach and retreat, how you make you turn and raise or lower your eyes, and move from one action to another, all play their part. It makes you do it over and over again, even when you’re staring at a single work. How much you make me feel alive. Those turning points and axes and breaks, those multiply colored sticks that you order and rearrange and repeat, generate movement and a majestic sense of stubborn stasis.

With its wave-like, perfectly calibrated rhythm, Arrest 3, from 1965, loses me in the same kind of visual puzzle as the pattern on a Moroccan tiled floor. “Tape 3” (1980), with its most complex, dense and curved lines of colour, flowing together and diverging, draws my gaze to the swell of its cross-currents as the water current pulls me along it.

The stacked vertical panels of Pharaoh, painted last year, are held in place by eight regularly spaced white pauses; Moments when you hold your breath until you pull away to breathe in air.

Riley’s recent, current paintings are like seeing a pattern of triangles through the distorted undulations of a glass door. Larger triangles and sinuous rhythms proliferate, less in the paintings themselves than in the mind of the viewer. The two paintings titled “Late Morning”: one a wide canvas filled with horizontals (1967-8), the other (from 1978) with narrow filled vertical lines, made me find bulges and stumbles where none existed. I ended up on my hands and knees, checking. Why is it named after a time of day? Does time move away towards the edges of the painting, with the past receding on one side, and advancing and shining towards an indeterminate future on the other side? I’m lost in the middle of incomprehensible things.

For most of her long career, Riley believed that “as a modern artist, you have to make, even a small contribution, to the art of your time.” Riley’s contribution grows over time. She was singular and focused in her preoccupation with the acts of looking and seeing. The two are not the same thing. Seeing can be a glance (what de Kooning once called “the sliding glance”), but Rayleigh prolongs the glance and the sliding into prolonged, repetitive acts of looking. It shifts the focus to a dream and leaves me amazed, open and surprised. I can’t stop looking.