Feny

Vasarely’s use of resources such as meshes and grids with which he marked and visually recreated the depth of space on the canvas, as early as 1938, evolved in the early 1950s into more complex mathematical structures, or morbid oval forms, as in the Belle-Isle period. These show his desire to go beyond the physical space of the canvas, with the intention of visually breaking its perimeter limits and attracting the viewer’s eyes to the virtual volumes that are formed inside it. These formal and conceptual conquests (with their binary black-white units) derive in Vasarely’s position on kineticism, which he made public as a result of the exhibition Le Mouvement (1955) and which differed from that of those who defended the inclusion of mechanical means to achieve a moving picture. Vasarely, on the other hand, affirmed that “kineticism is that which occurs in the spirit of the spectator when his eye is forced to organize an unstable perceptual field” -thus laying the foundations of pop-art-. For his part, he proposed kinetic works with depth effects in which the suggestion of movement depended on the actual movement of the spectator (making him an active agent).

Working in parallel in the practical and theoretical areas, Vasarely developed a keen interest in contemporary scientific thought and advances (then focused on the study of space and the possibility of traveling beyond the limits of the Earth), quantum physics, the theory of relativity and astrophysics. In the scientific literature he found the basis for his painting, coming to the consideration of the painting as an open window to the world and to the unknown but undiscovered galaxies. He kept as a theme a sentence he read in one of those books: “In the end, one could consider matter-energy as a deformation of space”. In this turn towards cosmic harmony Vasarely introduced in his painting the notion of spatial dilation, movement and time (duration). The simplest geometric forms (squares, circles, rhombuses, rectangles) and the use of a reduced palette, although used in its full range of gradual darkening and lightening, became the main ingredients of his work (Planetary Folklore period).

The work Feny (1973) is inscribed in this moment in which the topographic as a reference (Belle-Isle, Denfert, Gordes periods) was losing prominence in favor of a poetry of science and knowledge. It is not for nothing that its title corresponds to the Hungarian word for light; a gesture by Vasarely that reveals his obsessive inclination for astrophysics, since he also titled other works with names of galaxies and stars (Vega, Cassiopeia and Eridan) or with words that in Hungarian mean space and planet (Ter and Bolygo). Feny is presented as a composition of large dimensions, balanced and extremely simple. It is based on the plastic unity of the circle inscribed in a square and offers its multiple chromatic and formal gradual permutations attending to an exercise of dilation in two points of the canvas (space), which before the view of the spectator become volume and emerge to the surface and from which it is expected to deflate afterwards. In this almost respiratory rhythm of an abstract part of the universe, as the artist delights in the ambiguity of shapes and dimensions, underlies the optical nature and power of this painting. In Feny we can recognize the prototype of the work without imprint (trace or gesture) and infinitely expandable that Vasarely suggested, and he has elevated the practice of trompe l’oeil to virtuoso levels. In addition, without any identifiable bodies or masses in the painting, he has managed to confer on it effects of extraordinary luminosity, thanks to the rigor in the permutation of the color ranges, as the artist recognized.

Rocío Robles Tardío