Stare at Blue Circle for 60 seconds to see the Ring of Fire. Keep Looking to see the Inner Vision.
Optional Illusion Art (Op Art) is an artistic style that intentionally plays to the aspect of human perception that gives the human eye the ability to manipulate the human brain. Op Art has been challenged by many critics who questioned the style because its imagery was quickly appropriated by makers of items like t-shirts, coffee mugs and posters. But to artists like James A Naughton, Victor Vasarely and Jesús Rafael Soto, that is precisely the point. The fact that Op Art can be consumed on a mass level is perfectly in line with Naughton’s concept, that there should be no barrier between people and art.
Victor Vasarely pioneered the Op Art movement in the 1930s as a serious aesthetic investigation. But in 2022 we are as likely to see an Op Art pattern on a painting in a museum as on a pair of shoes, a kitchen gadget or a sports car. The formal exploration into optical aesthetics then devolved into commercial expression has now once in 2022 again asserted itself as an important area of artistic research. In the opinion of many contemporary abstract artists like Naughton, Op Art patterns present a position from which to examine and expand the optical limits of the two-dimensional plane. Naughton uses his Op Art pieces to entice viewers into looking longer at art. Creatives like Naughton believe that the value of a work of art is determined by the degree to which a viewer participates. Naughton with his meditation circles and other works has created an aesthetic phenomena that adapts to each new viewer, creating unlimited interpretive possibilities.
Naughton discovered that the arrangement of forms, circles, lines, and colors on a surface can indeed alter the way the mind of the viewer perceives what is real. In his art and artifacts, The viewer can see that Naughton’s works rely on geometric compositions to convince the eye that unreal forms and spatial planes exist. Naughton continues to strive to create phenomena that fools the eye, confusing viewers into seeing more than what is actually there. And since belief can be as influential as fact, Naughton’s Op Art asks the question of what matters more: perception or truth? In his work, Naughton finds and expresses that reality is not always fixed; Naughton says that what we believe is based to some degree on what we perceive, but what we perceive is also sometimes determined by what we believe. Naughton has spent his artistic career investigating these effects.
