ART REVIEW : Artist Eclipsed by Showman in Vasarely

Before the Vasarely cuff links, the Vasarely wristwatches, before the mass-produced Vasarely serigraphs and acrylic sculpture, there was a Vasarely of more humble intentions. Before the flamboyant visual gymnastics, there was a gentle stretching of the boundaries, a limbering of the optical muscles, a prodding of convention and expectation.

The current exhibition of Victor Vasarely’s work at Circle Gallery (2501 San Diego Ave., through Dec. 3) shows us both the artist and the athlete, but it is the latter, the showman, who prevails and casts a dishonorable shadow across the entire oeuvre.

The Hungarian-born artist, now in his 80s, is featured in a series of exhibitions at four Circle Gallery branches across the country. Collectively titled “Victor Vasarely: A Retrospective Exhibition/Selections From 50 Years of Artistic Achievement,” the shows can be seen in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, in addition to the show in Old Town.

Vasarely moved to Paris in 1930 and began to experiment with geometric abstraction while working in advertising. Not until after the war, however, did he resume his interest in the illusory spatial effects he could muster through the basic tools of line and color.

Several series of drawings from the early 1950s, on view in the local show, possess a fresh, spirited approach to line. Among them are the “Denfert” period drawings, inspired by the cracked tiles in a train station that the artist frequented, in which organic shapes embrace and overlap with modest but appealing energy. The “Naissance” series ventures further into the realm of illusion and suggestion, terrain that Vasarely has since exhausted mercilessly. In these early works, the artist has filled each page with parallel lines that dip or buckle toward the center of the image. The detour is often slight, but enough of a deviation to imply movement and depth on the static, flat page.

The paintings and collages that follow immediately after these works are equally unpretentious. They play with the ambiguity of positive and negative space, the secret depth of flat shadows, the power of repetition and echo. But, by the 1960s, Vasarely had all but discarded the subdued tones and organic origins of his early work for images of a tightly controlled geometry in a range of searingly bright colors.

His efforts to make the flat surface breathe, to coerce straight lines into the appearance of curves and to make the static page feel animated and alive gave birth to a popular style coined Op Art (short for Optical Art) in the early ‘60s. The delightful infidelities of line and color have preoccupied the artist ever since. His tour de force paintings and prints of the past few decades feature patterns of circles, squares and diamonds that, through their spacing and coloration, create the illusion of bulging, pulsating, stretching forms.

Ironically, these highly synthetic-seeming exercises were inspired, according to Vasarely’s writings, by the natural world, with its still, stable surface concealing a microcosmic beehive of activity. Since the early line drawings and collages, however, nothing in the artist’s signature style even hints of the organic. Their artificially vivid greens, oranges and purples, as well as their seamless surfaces, reveal as little of the human hand as of the human soul.

The Circle Gallery show does contain a few pleasant surprises, even in the later work--such as the simple but engaging collage, “Elo” of 1989--but the bulk of Vasarely’s art is merely dazzling and dry.