One of the subtlest and most entrancing of Bridget Riley's early paintings, Static 2 (1966), consists of a field of black spots arranged in a pure grid, 25 by 25, across a white square. Static, as the title says, and yet the painting isn't inert: a lovely sense of inner movement is conveyed by the way the spots, which are not pure circles but mildly oval, are systematically shifted in their orientation around the canvas so that the stolid grid is forever displacing its balance just a little, as if a millipede were shifting its weight from foot to foot. The painting gracefully combines the classical ideal of stability with Romanticism's restless play of unresolvable tensions.

LRB 10 July 2003 | PDF Download