Boygo

Executed in 1968, Boygo is a hypnotic example of Victor Vasarely’s pioneering Op Art permutations of shape and hue. The work is a 1.6m x 1.6m square painted in alternating vertical stripes of grey and yellow, which gradually broaden and darken toward a deep blue-grey at the composition’s centre; the stripes warp at right-angles to create the impression of a large hovering circle. From his rigid ingredients, Vasarely conjures a coruscating expanse of perceptual stimulation. Shifting from nuanced darkness to sunlit luminosity, and from pencil-thin to almost ten centimetres wide, each flat zone of colour is precisely manipulated in chorus to create a vivid impression of light and shade. The illusory circle seems to sink or protrude in three dimensions; at the same time, the work’s bilateral glow creates the impression of a pair of doors opening into recessed space. Through his subtle interplays of tone and contrast, Vasarely achieves what he called la plastique cinétique – a kinetic union of form and colour that acts on the retina itself to produce the astonishing, disorienting illusion of movement.


Having begun his academic career in medicine, the Hungarian-French Vasarely abandoned his studies in 1927 to learn traditional academic painting; he subsequently trained as a graphic designer at the Műhely (literally ‘Workshop’), a private art school that was Budapest’s centre of Bauhaus studies. He settled in Paris in 1930, where he found some success in graphic design and poster art, before abandoning these in 1939 for a total focus on painting. Over the following years he worked in a figurative mode that was dominated by the play of contrasts, until in 1947 he hit upon the abstract geometric style that would define his life’s work: he would later refer to his figurative period as one of ‘false roads’ that led to his eventual abstract orientation. In his optical illusions, Vasarely proposed a universal and accessible art of virtual movement, influenced by the simple, powerful forms of artists such as Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. Through the ‘visual kinetics’ of works like Boygo, the work is completed by the perception of the viewer, and flat surfaces are transformed into scintillating zones that seem to swell, shift and shimmer with perpetual life. In the flickering, lambent presence of works like Boygo, Vasarely recognised a glimpse of the eternal. ‘I cannot stop myself from perceiving an uncanny analogy between my “kinetic plasticity” and the combination of the micro and macro cosmos,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is there: Space, Persistence, Corpuscles and Waves, Relations and Fields. My art transfers Nature once again, this time that of pure physics, in such a way as to enable a physical understanding of the world’ (V. Vasarely, Plasticien, Paris 1979, p. 185).