Feny is the Hungarian word for light, the agency that stimulates sight and makes things visible. Vasarely, known as the founding father of Op Art was born in Pécs, Hungry in 1906. Many of his monumentally sized works are housed at the Vasarely Foundation in Aix-en-Provence, France. Vasarely lived and worked in Paris after leaving Budapest in 1930. He was successful in pursuing employment as a graphic artist for advertisement agencies. However, he soon deviated from post-war abstraction to harness the power of geometry. Formulating meticulous compositions that explored the principles of colour and perspective in optics. Feny showcases Vasarely’s ability to demonstrate a holistic approach to composition, combining light and colour seamlessly with shapes in their purest form. Feny spans just under two by two metres and is exhibited at the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. The work is spatially ambiguous; as the eye is drawn to multiple locations, no true focal point can be asserted within the square canvas. Rather, it is to be viewed by following the visual pathway commanded by the eb and flow of its dynamic composition. The hallucinatory effects of Feny confirm the very intention of Op Art – to explore and experiment with how the brain interprets visual information. Vasarely was concerned with stipping away semantics and cultural boundaries in order to communicate a visual vocabulary that could be universally understood. He sought to remove political and economical power from the venn diagram that encircles the art world. 

Feny is composed solely of spherical shapes within a grid formation. The matte finish of the acrylic paint bears no sheen and so each individual tonal gradient implores the differentiation of light from dark. In the bottom left corner of the frame, moving upwards then across through to the top left corner, pale lilac circles proliferate. As they become smaller and less spherical, their colour intensifies into deep cobalt blue through to a rich royal purple. As each perfect circle gradually deforms with dramatic motion, the netting that they create almost tears from the impending burst of the spheres. These ball-shaped boulbouses bulge out from their sinuous netting and seize the top left and bottom right of the composition. In the bottom right corner, the circles’ cerulean blue hue diverge again from an imaginary straight line. They course back to lilac as the eye is led into the dips they emerged from. The observed velocity within the painting resembles a doppler effect; a radar of diagrammatic movement. There is a clear increase and decrease in light and frequency throughout the encounter of Feny. The formation throbs and becomes compressed under mounting pressure. The source of this physical force is the strain placed upon the netting like a finger poking into the canvas. This visual pressure results in the expulsion of weight in another location; the bulging spheres appear to stretch the painting to its limit at these two points in the composition. The weight of the dual protrusions in the painting are the dominant elements. Pulsating with urgency, the two forms maintain balance within the composition by remaining equidistant from one another. In the deepest crevasses of the canvas, the cyan web attempts to escape into the abyss it emerged from. Only to reanimate with vigour as it is pulled back out from the delves of the vividly woven colours. The darkest indigo circles form a halo effect around the bottom left protuberance, encasing it in its own pointillistic ripple effect. The surging masses billow and sink at the four corners, reconfiguring the perception of the painting with each glance. The background and foreground of the painting are starkly contrasted but appear to yield to each other’s forces. This causes retinal confusion. It is the possibility of insinuated real motion that excites the eye. Through the apparent convergence of geometry, only a virtual movement through the placement and ultimate stagnation of the shapes is perceived. The expulsion of these two outwardly appearing spheres create contrast to the sucktion motion that is detected in the other corners of the composition. The sense of constant inflation and deflation is palpable. The oscillation of the two apparent indentations and dual protrusions suggest motion with static forms.¹ Thus the very nuances of vision itself are explored as prolonged viewing gives rise to new perceptions of the work with each observation. The simultaneous vanishing points and reappearing perforations mimic how a strobe light bounces into vision as quickly as it disappears, leaving behind coloured spots in the eye. These sensations could be likened to various conditions and disorders associated with poor visual acuity. For example, Oscillopsia is the abnormal interaction of the physiological mechanisms of movements in the eye  resulting in illusions that make the world appear unstable.² Perhaps the quintessential modern concern with the difference between what is seen and what is actually there³ is materialised within Feny. Certainly, Feny is a manifestation of art in the modern world. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the psychedelic mood⁴ was aestheticising all fields of popular culture. Vasarely was dedicated to creating new worlds in his works of art, a term he described as “planetary folklore”. These new worlds that are materialised in many of Vasarely’s works could be likened to the effects hallucinogenic drugs have on the human brain. Colloquially known as taking a trip. Interpreting Feny proves as labyrinthine as the very visual experience of the painting.In fact it could be said that Feny goes against interpretation. This being one of the anxious tendencies⁵ Ihab Hassan describes postmodern art to possess. According to Hassan’s table of differences that classify and discern the modern and the postmodern, it becomes clear that Vasarely’s Feny takes a trip between the  two categories and classifications. Regarding centering vs. dispersal, Feny’s capacious composition encompasses both of these actions  followed by an ocular release of tension. Depth vs. surface also comes into play when realising that the illusion is limited within the constraints of the 180x180cm square frame, yet the encounter is infinite. The functionality and purposiveness of Feny as an art work requires both distance and participation in order to be perceived as an ever expanding form in the metamodern era.

1. “Victor Vasarely Art, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story. Accessed March 21, 2023. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vasarely-victor/#:~:text=Like%20his%20predecessors%20in%20the,of%20endlessly%20interchangeable%20compositional%20elements ↩︎
2. Tilikete, Caroline, and Alain Vighetto. “Oscillopsia: Causes and Management.” Current Opinion in Neurology 24, no. 1 (2011): 38–43. https://doi.org/10.1097/wco.0b013e328341e3b5. ↩︎
3. “Victor Vasarely Art, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story. Accessed March 21, 2023. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vasarely-victor/#:~:text=Like%20his%20predecessors%20in%20the,of%20endlessly%20interchangeable%20compositional%20elements. ↩︎
4. “Victor Vasarely Art, Bio, Ideas.” The Art Story. Accessed March 21, 2023. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/vasarely-victor/#:~:text=Like%20his%20predecessors%20in%20the,of%20endlessly%20interchangeable%20compositional%20elements. ↩︎
5. Ihab Hassan, The dismemberment of orpheus, (Second Edition), Madison, Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982, XI. ↩︎