Sometimes a smaller exhibition is more effective than a full-blown survey. Bridget Riley: Learning to See at Margate’s Turner Contemporary brings us an invigorating and magical ensemble, juxtaposing 26 works from the 1960s to the present and shuttling between large canvases, studies and works painted directly on the wall. Learning to See concentrates the mind and sharpens the eye.
Riley’s paintings come at you all at once. They arrest you and they still you. The longer you look, the more they reveal and the more they seem to change. As they ensnare you, the more rewarding they become. “How does she do that?”, might be a first thought. How are the colours ordered, what’s the logic of their construction? But there’re also the things they do to your nervous system, in that unknowable gulf between eye and brain, between perception and its after-image. The colour values of Dancing to the Music of Time (2022), a big wall drawing made originally for a museum in Canberra, go dun-coloured as you first approach, until each painted disc begins to glow with a silvery penumbra. Comparing colours, you can’t remember the last as you come to the next. I pinball back and forth, getting lost in the music. Angel, a smaller wall drawing, has discs whose stately turning alignments have the kind of brevity and apparent simplicity and inevitability of a few piano phrases by Erik Satie. It’s simple. It’s complicated. It’s mesmerising.
