Bridget Riley

Mr. Charles Sonabend, London
Robert Sandelson Gallery, London
Private Collection, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Bridget Riley, 1975, no. 12, titled incorrectly as Halcyon
Milan, Palazzo Reale, Arte Inglese Oggi 1960-76, 1976, no. 41/7
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Dallas, Museum of Fine Arts; Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales; Perth, Art Gallery of Western Australia; Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art, Bridget Riley: Works 1959-78, 1978, p. 53, no. 42, illustrated in colour 

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is very light rubbing towards the extreme tip of the bottom right corner. Close inspection reveals two pin-sized, faint and unobtrusive fly spots towards the right of the centre of the canvas and another towards the centre of the upper left quadrant. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"I saw that the basis of colour is its instability." (the artist interviewed by Michael Craig-Martin in Robert Kudielka, Ed., Dialogues on Art, London 1995, p. 56)

 

Clandestine from 1973 is one of the Bridget Riley's most complex and sophisticated colour compositions. Although Riley had used the coloured stripe as a compositional element since the seminal Chant 2 in 1967, it was not until the early 1970s that she developed the technique seen here of 'twisting' the coloured zips around each other. In Clandestine, the composition is built up of intermittent vertical bands of black, white and colour. The coloured stripe is continually shifting, hovering between different hues and preventing the eye from ascertaining what colour it is. On close inspection, we see that this vertical band is made up of thin pink, turquoise and ochre ribbons which are twisted around each other like rope. This is a technique which made its first appearance in Zing I, a more simple painting of 1971 composed of just three colours red, blue and green. The effect of twisting these three colours is to destabilise our sensory experience and most surprisingly from the picture made up of purely vertical elements our eye detects horizontal zones of variously tinted light which traverse the vertical formations.

 

This seemingly simple means generates a magisterial chromatic effect of astonishing diversity and the static canvas seems to flicker before our eyes. By pairing different colours together, Riley interrogates the instability of colour, which changes by proximity to another colour. From the three colours in Clandestine, Riley creates the sensation of numerous other colours, including orange and mauve. As soon as we try to scrutinise these areas of colour, they disappear as a result of our focus and appear elsewhere on the canvas in our outer field of vision. Although individually these incidents of colour change are quite faint, the combination of colour interaction and the high frequency of the repetition amplifies the effect. As she experimented with colour in various different compositions over the course of the 1970s, Riley recognised that the chromatic visual effect is heightened by the length of the line, as the greater length allows for a greater edge between two colours.

 

Riley was fascinated by colour from an early age and throughout the 1950s she made numerous studies from Georges Seurat, seeking to understand the mechanics behind the colour theory of the master of Pointilism. After her breakthrough works of the 1960s, in which she explored the fertile binary dialectic of high contrast black and white, in the early 1970s she eradicated black from her palette as colour became her principal concern. Interestingly, Clandestine is one of the first works in which she reintroduces black into her paintings. While the central bands are jet black, as these bands progress towards the left and right side edges of the composition they become increasingly tonally matched to the colours which flank them. The effect is to give more weight and density to the play of colour. Where the contrast between black and white is strongest, the colours seem most strident, creating hotspots of colour in the central segment of the composition while the edges appear more muted.

 

Engaging with a long tradition of formal abstraction, in particular the American colour field painters like Barnett Newman who were given prominence in London in the 1960s through museum and gallery shows, Riley develops this formal language and brings it to bear on her own individual concerns. She takes Newman's 'zips' of light and, through complex juxtaposition with other colours, she energises them, turning the physical stuff of paint on canvas into pure light. Ethereal and fleeting, the experience of standing in front of one of her paintings is something entirely unique.  More than any artist of her generation, she has pushed the boundaries of colour in a career-long investigation in which Clandestine represents an important phase.