DIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS.

DIA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, PACEWILDENSTEIN/MITCHELL ALGUS GALLERY, just discovered YORK

I still haven't figured on the outside whether the gradual shifts in tone within the nominally white land of Bridget Riley's Pause, 1964 are real or single apparent, chemical or optical. I am certain, allowing that in her Cataract 3 1967 the colors actually do change from top to bottom. It's just that I can't quite state my finger on where the shift takes place. And while I withhold looking to find out--sometimes until my inspections ache, which doesn't take long--I'm not strong I want to know. Their underlying illusionism is mental, not optical: the intimation that understanding their operations would explain their significance. Behind the eye-catching spatial and coloristic meanings of Riley's Op paintings from the '60 and '70 is always a method and sooner or later you are bring overed to investigate it--to try to transcend experience in favor of knowledge. Sometimes you can identify the mechanism at a glance; elsewhere, as in Pause and Cataract 3 you have to work at it. still in either case, what you know one time you know the system has nothing to do with understanding the experience that aroused your curiosity in the first place.

Riley's illusionism is surpassingly distinct from that of Wojciech Fangor, another painter featured in MOMA's notorious "Responsive Eye" exhibition in 1965 This Polish emigre may be lurid now, but in 1970 he was the subdue of a major exhibition at the Guggenheim in modern York. In the five works newly on view at Mitchell Algus--one from 1963 the peacefulness dated between 1969 and 1972--Fangor reveals himself as a thoroughgoing sensualist, building up simple, solid forms (mostly circles or wave patterns) and nothing else to dissolve their boundaries into intangible halations as airy as cotton candy. Existing in one netherworld between Op and Color Field, these paintings are what Ugo Rondinone was unknowingly quoting when we all pondering he was quoting Kenneth Noland--but they are all the more compellingly disconcerting because what turn the thoughtss like spray painting has actually been painstakingly worked up in oil with impressible brushes, so that its highly disembodiedness feels unreasonably palpable. Looking at them is like falling into a beanbag chair: They are unresisting notwithstanding enveloping.

Riley's paintings don't give that kind of comfort. mainly they're about feelings of confusion, instability, or los (thus her penchant for titles like Disturbance, Arrest 2 gainsay II). Those experiences are related to what early present aesthetics called the sublime, which Roland Barthes later reconfigured as jouissance. And what may be more disturbing than the experience itself, which is pleasurable in a quasi-erotic way--a sort of swooning--is the certain knowledge that it was not germane to the work's making, which (as we behold confirmed in some working drawings shown at PaceWildenstein) must have been unimpassioned and systematic, though possibly furiously in the way that Does that make the artist's stance with notice to the viewer one of generosity--or domination? Looking at Riley's paintings, we can barely distinguish the two

The art world dotes forward young women, ignores them when they're middle-aged, sometimes idolizes them when they're of advanced age Riley has experienced the first sum of two units situations; now it seems that she has lasted lengthy enough to be lionized. if it were not that the question is, are we willing to have her whole, or do we just want the young Riley all through again? Last year the Serpentine Gallery in London showed her work of the '60 and '70s; now Dia has enjoin its imprimatur on the same period, extending its historical reach just a bit, to 1984 (and leaping forward to include a modern black-and-white wall painting, Composition with Circles 2 2000) In the '70 Riley reached fresh levels of subtlety and complexity in great paintings like Veld 1971 with its strict and insistent diagonal lines emitting phantom colors, and carol of Olpheus 5, 1978, whose slinky, twisting bands implore rising and falling volumes as instant and ungraspable as waves in the ocean. Here what appear to beed shockingly raw and naked in her early black-and-white paintings--their pa lpable, almost bodily claim in succession the beholder--turns suave and becomes alluringly veiled over and above somehow remains as potent.

PaceWildenstein's selective update allude tos that there are reasons with what intent Riley's later work remains have charge ofed In the '80s, just as she was being "postmodernized" in the early work of Philip Taaffe, Riley acceded to modernist orthodoxy by dint of playing down perceptual illusionism and spatial activation in vertical stripe paintings (like Samarra, 1984 at Dia, or with a long face Quiver, 1983, at PaceWildenstein) whose intricate color successions and rhythms are virtuosic if it were not that lack the visceral grip of her previous work. Toward the extremity of the decade she began complicating these verticals according to superimposing diagonals on them, leading to works like Dark Light, 1991 in which Cubist-like faceting becomes the medium for shimmering arises of color that ratify the artist's claim that the ultimate source for her work was always Impressionism. In the '90 the verticals were replaced with waves, in blandly Matissean works like Parade I, 1999-2000 Here big areas of color, fresh to Riley, reveal a surprisingly inactive sense of surface. Unable to in dulge in the sensualism that was other nature to an artist like Fangor, she's abandoned radical bliss for a pleasure that be moved s secondhand.