Vi-Va 1978

This is Vi-Va by Victor Vasarely and it's a real eye-bender, isn't it? Look at how those shapes vibrate and push back and forth! It feels like you could fall right in there and tumble through space. I bet Vasarely was a real tinkerer, carefully laying out his composition, working with the geometry of perception. The more you look, the more you can see how he's made the impossible, possible, and it's all in service of this great visual buzz. I wonder if he was listening to music when he made this? Vi-Va reminds me of Josef Albers and his Homage to the Square paintings. You can see how artists are in an ongoing conversation, passing ideas back and forth like a game of telephone across generations. And that’s what painting's all about, right? It's an exchange, a back-and-forth, that keeps us seeing and feeling in new ways.