Victor Vasarely

"Hat - Poup - Va", 1972

Tempera on wood, 93 x 80 cm
(with original artist's frame)
N 8932
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titled, dated, signed on the reverse
  
With an aesthetic sensibility rooted in the tradition of constructivism, the Hungarian-born artist Victor Vasarely fashioned an artistic language to which many people even today can easily relate. Based purely on optical effects, his repertoire of form and colour, developed from the 1950s onwards, is universally intelligible, independent of education and culture. "My objective is to create an art which both serves the common good and is accessible to all, and which contributes to the physical and spiritual well-being of humanity"¹, was one of his creeds. At the heart of Vasarely's art lay not the endeavour to imitate the real world, but rather he designed his own autonomous system of reference using a canon of geometrical forms. And although these forge a functioning world of art, independent of reality, they are based on the principles of optics which decisively shape the relationship of Man to his environment. Thus despite continuing to inhabit the world of art, Vasarely's work it is at the same time, inextricably bound within environment of the viewer. On the one hand, his work impresses by virtue of its high aesthetic value, in addition to an almost inconceivable technical artistry and sophistication, whilst on the other hand, highlighting - particularly in the "Vega" series, to which this painting can also be considered to belong - the incomprehensibility and the relativity of visual phenomena. All this, which to the viewer appears to possess sculptural dimensions even in the work "Hat-Poup-Va" from 1972, is known as "plane painting". "The sculptural space, the locus of the forms and colours must, of necessity, be more than the two-dimensional surface of the panel painting. Since time immemorial, the tragedy and triumph of the painter has been to strive to achieve the impossible: to produce more with less, to conjure on this one surface more than one dimension".²
(Andrea Fink-Belgin)
  
¹ Victor Vasarely, here quoted from: Susanne Pfleger, Vasarely nach Vasarely, in: exh. cat. Vasarely - Erfinder der OP-Art, ed. Richard W. Gassen, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum Ludwigshafen am Rhein, 9.11.1997 - 25.1.1998, Kunstverein Wolfsburg 8.2. - 19.4.1998, Quadrat - Bottrop Josef Albers Museum, 17.5. - 23.8.1998, Ostfildern 1997, p. 183 - 191, here: p. 183.
² Ibid.