Velte

In 1930, Hungarian painter and sculptor Victor Vasarely moved to Paris and started to work as a graphic designer for advertisement agencies, magazines, and newspapers. His use of black-and-white grids and linear systems, seen in his early commercial practice, later manifested in his well-known “Black-White” period of 1951 to 1963. During this time, he began to investigate the optical effects that emerged through the dialectical relationship between negative and positive space. Vasarely further refined his application of binary oppositions through experiments with photographic techniques, in particular the study of negatives and positives, transparencies and frames. In "Velte", square units of different sizes suggest four equal frames; the separation of dark and light zones creates four mirror images. His use of binary colors underscores the optical inversion at play, in which tonal gradients of black and white mirror each other along dynamic, diagonal axes. Form and color are no longer separated: they become, here, an indivisible unit in the representation of multidimensional space.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.