The stake is no longer the heart, but the retina, and the beautiful soul has now become an object of study of experimental psychology. The abrupt contrasts in black and white, the unbearable vibration of complementary colors, the glistening interweaving of lines and the permuted structures are all elements of my work whose task is no longer that of immersing the observer in a sweet melancholy, but of stimulate him and his eye with him.
Victor Vasarely
The optical-visual illusions are the consequence of the art of Linda Arts who, through her knowledge of theories of form, colour and perception, explores new visual and imaginative worlds by the elements of light and space.
According to the basic principles of Optical Art, whose prevalent character is perceived in her artistic production, the Dutch artist attributes a plastic value to artworks by generating optical deceptions. This is due to the wise use of geometric shapes and colours that alternate in shades of black and white to give life to abstract spaces and illusionistic movements thanks to optical-perceptive features that create a virtual dynamism in the eyes and in the mind of the observer. The grey scales and the linear modules that make up her pictorial syntax are the elements that contribute to the production of mental and perceptual effects capable of stimulating a series of active and participatory reactions in the spectator. This latter, in fact, is involved as an integral part of the work since his movement causes a substantial change in the perception of the work itself that interacts with the visitor and the environment. Therefore, the bystander is called to fulfil a participatory role of completion, through his presence and his interaction with the space by means of his perceptual apparatus. In this way the work is renewed each time that the observing subject changes: for each individual and every consequent movement, new cognitive experiences are reserved.
For the most illustrious exponent of Optical Art, Victor Vasarely, the optical problem was not reducible to the mere representation of visual games, but it had to do with the understanding of man’s cognitive mechanisms. Visual stimulation becomes, as well as in Arts, an expedient to induce an epistemological order experience in the observer. In fact, the artist investigates the limits of human cognitive activity through the creation of pictorial universes, of light wall installations, like windows on a different world where one can face and experience unexpected perceptual and chromatic effects able to stimulate the whole retinal and psychic apparatus of the observer. “The stakes”, wrote Vasarely, “is no longer the heart, but the retina”. In fact, Linda Arts realizes modular structures (Sol LeWitt) that develop from a serial repetition of geometric models. The manipulation and variability of geometric structures, sometimes elementary such as the square or the cube, are the minimal modular expression that underlies the idea of space in Western thought from the Renaissance to today. Historically the trompe l’oeil is the effect defining the optical deception in art, which starting from the 5th century BC has stimulated the artists who have ventured into the proposal of alternative and suggestive worlds. It is precisely during the Italian Renaissance, with the mathematical theorization of perspective, that this illusion makes its way through the arts up to the abstraction, the creation of alternative worlds disconnected from any naturalistic relationship.
In Linda Arts, any reference to the natural does not exist in the conception of the works nor in the attribution of retrospective figurations in the titles. The entire creative and realisation process takes place at an intellectual level in the mind of the artist who creates with a meticulous execution methodology and, in the same time, little irregularities, in order to allow her to experiment the optical vibration on the surface of the work, an abstract-geometric figuration enriched of more personality. The space, intended not only as a synonym of the third dimension, is the leit motif of all her artistic reflection that also thickens with problems on the perception of spatial structures. In fact, this introduce us into a purely psychological analytic field: that of Gestalt. The ability to perceive an object, therefore, must be traced in an organization presided by the system according to schemes appropriately selected and able to give shape to the perception. This sort of unconscious intellectual completion is at the base of the creative and realization process of the artist who, with its elusive and dynamic forms, obliges the observer to change continuously his point of view. The optical and cognitive stress, the slippage of visual planes, create an unstable spatiality, which expands the times of perception by subtracting from a definitive impression.
Hence, the passage to a pure visibility approach (Konrad Fiedler, The assessment on figurative art works, 1876) of analysis of the work is essential, because art overcomes the mimesis of reality for the fact that each of us perceives reality in different way from the others. There is a reality that leaves aside on artworks, and consequently the artist, at work, creates a new world as a fruit of his perceptions and his pictorial gesture.
Linda Arts is, therefore, an artist able to combine in her visual-analytical art the most intimate perceptual components at an intellectual and formal level allowing the observer to enter into these phantasmagorical architectures, Renaissance cathedrals where the perspective space is produced by means of a rhythmic alternation of illusionistic geometric modules.
Valeria Ceregini 