"Bridget Riley's latest body of works, easel and wall paintings, turns its back on what has been considered, since the mid-1960s, her main field of investigation: the exploration of the rich and unexpected properties of colour. By concentrating on black and white, she returns to her seminal work of the early 1960s, except that now the particulars of the paintings, as well as the current context, far removed from the teleological triumphalism of that period, are very different. There is no nostalgia in this going back to a long-gone past, but rather a self-archaeology, in the sense of Agamben rather than of Foucault: a way of looking at the traces and orders left by the past not only to better understand the present but also to uncover some paths that were left aside or were developed in one direction only, when they could have been used differently – 'the self-revelation of the present as that which we had not been able to live or think'."
E. de Chassey, 'Unbound Certainties', in Bridget Riley, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2015, p. 27
