Study after Cartoon. September 5 '90.

A tapestry of vibrant tonalities fills Bridget Riley’s Study After Cartoon. September 5 ’90, 1990, revealing her acute sensitivity to the powers of colour. Interwoven blocks of brilliant green, rose, teal, goldenrod and white form a kinetic tessellation: as the kaleidoscope unfolds, the work appears to dance and sway. Riley used the term ‘cartoon’ to refer to her mock-ups, often developed from experiments with coloured strips of paper, that allowed her to plan her larger canvases. This process of careful study and preparation, as exemplified here, played an integral role in her exploration of the chromatic spectrum, allowing her to observe the interaction of different hues in close detail. The present work bears witness to her embrace of the diagonal, or ‘zig’, at the close of the 1980s: a dramatic change for the artist who had previously worked primarily with vertical strips. The ruptured colours brought new depth and complexity to her investigations: ‘eventually,’ she recounted, ‘I found what I was looking for in the conjunction of the vertical and diagonal ... this conjunction was the new form. It could be seen as a patch of colour – acting almost like a brush mark’ (B. Riley, quoted in Bridget Riley: Flashback, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 2009, p. 18).

Riley studied at the Royal College of Art in London, where she was influenced by avant-garde movements including Pointillism and Futurism as well as the works of Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. Like many of her predecessors, she saw colour as possessing both visual and emotive potential, deeply connected to the natural world. ‘The colours are organised on the canvas so that the eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature’, she has explained. ‘It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift’ (B. Riley, ‘The Pleasures of Sight’, 1984, in R. Kudielka (ed.), The Eye’s Mind: Bridget Riley Collected Writings 1965-1999, London 1973, p. 33). The rhythmic push-pull carries the eye across the woven field of Study After Cartoon. The colourful surface seems to extend beyond the border of the image, its shimmering ravines and vivid passages charting a prismatic terrain.