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The optical gets a bad rap, subordinated to painting's other bigger brothers, say, the haptic, the impressive, the totalizing, or big. Visually informed sure, but not particularly optical. Perhaps even Abstract Expressionism despite its broad exclamation of color wasn't a particularly optical movement, more concerned with presence, a bodily feeling. (Against Abstraction Expressionism "Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could [ostensibly] communicate with dolphins and gods.") We lack language for the physiological, for the glass of our eyes attempting to apprehend something that breaks its system, like these, like a computer trying to understand the frission of Bonnard.
see too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan
