Alom I
Victor Vasarely
VICTOR VASARELY, c.1968. TEMPERA ON CANVAS.
Between the kinetic sculpture of Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Tinguely and the Pop Art of Andy Warhol sits the great Victor Vasarely. Working as an advertising designer in the 1930s, Vasarely developed a deep understanding of the power of geometric forms as a tool for attention. He became almost scientific about the behaviour of the human eye on a visual plane, and saw that the subtle optical illusions commanded discomfort, focus, and intrigue. Using industrially manufactured paints in their most slickly seductive forms, he created flat, one dimensional planes that he imbued with an impossible movement in the viewers mind. 'For me,’, he said, ‘Kineticism is what moves through the soul of the spectator when the eye is forced to organise an unstable perceptive field’. For all the visual trickery, his work is deeply soulful. It swallows you, begins to vibrate at the frequency of your neurons, ebbing and flowing in line with the viewers own energy. Vasarely lay the groundwork for a generation of artists who came to define the 20th century, and his own fingerprints can still be seen across contemporary art and design.