Executed at a pivotal moment in Bridget Riley’s career, Tinct exemplifies the artist’s investigation into the visual sensation of colour via a rigorous schematic of crossed stipes in glowing hues of aquamarine, purple and orange. Painted in 1972, the present painting is a vibrant exemplar of Riley’s interest in the nuances of light and tone, pure form and colour. Created only two years after her first retrospective, Tinct illuminates Riley’s full embrace of colour, marking a step away from her strictly monochromatic output of the 1960s. Attesting to its outstanding quality, Tinct was acquired by Galerie Beyeler in Basel shortly after it was executed. One of the most important institutions of contemporary art in Europe, Galerie Beyeler hosted a show of Riley’s work between February and March 1975. Tinct was a major highlight of this groundbreaking early exhibition, which would become one of Riley’s most important on the continent. Writing in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, curator and historian Bryan Robertson asserted, “A Riley painting is absolutely itself and nothing else; but one painting is gentle and subdued, soft in colour with delicate structural energy: hard not to think of mornings by the Aegean, or Boticelli, or the interior opalescence of a sea shell. Another painting is more directly persuasive: the colour blazes one, it flashes twice, and a gleaming-golden light hovers like a cloud, palpably non-existnet but implacably there” (Bryan Robertson quoted in: Exh. Cat., Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Bridget Riley, 1975, n.p.). Having remained in the same private collects ion for over thirty years, the present painting manifests the quasi-scientific role of chromatic perception so central to Riley’s oeuvre, as well as a profound awareness of the canon of traditional European painting.

Evading perspectival resolution, the present work is articulated by vertical stripes of alternating blue, lavender and orange. Upon close inspection, the colours are rich and distinct, yet viewed from afar, an optical illusion comes into play in which the eye registers unfamiliar tones of yellow, pink and green. In this manner, Tinct’s dazzling surface displays Riley’s scientific investigation into the intricacies of colour theory: “I do not select single colours but rather pairs, triads or groups of colour which taken together act as generators of what can be seen through or via the painting. By which I mean that 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. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. Vision can be arrested, tripped up or pulled back in order to float free again” (Bridget Riley, “The Pleasures of Sight,” in Exh. Cat., London, Tate Britain, Bridget Riley, 2003, p. 213).

The works from the early 1970s produce nuanced chromatic sensations, at once powerful and hallucinatory. Such paintings are iconic of Riley’s repertoire and are test.mes nt to the artist’s undisputed position as the leader of the Op Art movement. Yet the works from this moment in her career, more so than any other period, show Riley looking back into the art historical canon, and particularly to the masterworks of the Neo-Impressionists such as Cézanne, Monet and Seurat. The influence of these artists greatly impacted her own approach to colour and her understanding of abstraction and representation from the 1970s onwards. Art historian Robert Kudielka describes this influence at a pivotal moment in Riley’s career: “Only in the transitional phase of the 1970s, when she began to see what she calls the ‘Medusa’s Head of colour’, did she realise that the solitary path she was taking actually led through a well cultivated, if at the t.mes generally ignored, field. The gulf between nature and abstraction had already been discovered and explored by the great colourists of the nineteenth century. The major retrospective exhibitions of the late 1970s, and especially in New York – Cézanne: The Late Work (The Museum of Modern Art, 1977-78) and Monet’s Years at Giverny: Beyond Impressionism (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978) – helped her to understand this” (Robert Kudielka, “Bridget Riley,” in: Exh. Cat., Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland (and travelling), Bridget Riley, 2019, p. 127). As Riley herself asserts, “I have looked carefully at Seurat, Cezanne and others. To think that I rank myself with such great figures would be a misunderstanding. Above all, I believe that one should not deprive oneself of the pleasure of looking at and appreciating what has been achieved” (Bridget Riley quoted in: Jenny Harper, Bridget Riley: Paintings and Drawings 1961-2004, London, 2004, p. 95). The vibrant canvases of the 1970s show Riley considering, like her great predecessors, the structure of colour and space within abstract painting and fundamentally answering the question, “how does one deal with the differences between the way we normally ‘see’ things and their actual visual appearance?” (Robert Kudielka quoted in: Ibid., p. 126).

As one of the most celebrated British artists working today Riley has produced an oeuvre that spans over sixty years. Each decade she has pushed the boundaries of contemporary painting further via a highly systematic and minimalist approach to abstraction. Her electric, innovative style of painting in the ‘60s and ’70s seemed to reflect the atmosphere of emancipation and experimentation, and the corresponding relaxation of previously rigid social mores. Author Frances Follin notes: “As an Op artist, Riley was part of ‘new Britain’ along with the Beatles, Mary Quant and David Frost, her art aligned with the urban, scientific, socially progressive face of a new, young national identity” (Frances Follin, Embodied Visions: Bridget Riley, Op Art and the Sixties, London, 2004, p. 120). In its celebration of an entirely innovative form of abstraction, Tinct epitomises the energy and dynamism of its t.mes . This magnificent painting sees Riley combine the rigid logic of early colour theory with a complete painterly engagement with the surface of the canvas, resulting in a visual sensation that oscillates between the ‘plastic’ neutrality of the stripes and the optical brilliance of her colour palette.