Diamond Displacement in Blue and Purple
2009, Francis Celentano
Acrylic on canvas, 51" x 51"
Photo: courtesy Laura Russo Gallery

Op Art, whose cruxes are illusion and disorientation, will never become irrelevant unless popular culture stops trending toward eye candy and international affairs stop careening toward increasingly vertiginous meltdowns. This summer, with the Gulf of Mexico awash with crude and tensions in the Middle East and the Korean Peninsula boiling even more fiercely than usual, we seem to be in no threat of either possibility. Francis Celentano, a vigorous octogenarian who exhibited his first hard-edge abstraction in 1964, has for the last 46 years been playing variations on the Op theme. His 2008 outing at Laura Russo was titled "Le Cirque" and featured works in which neon and pastel colors ascended picture planes in woozily bending bars. This time around, he literally turns things on end in a series of lozenge paintings, turning the reassuring 90-degree horizontal/vertical axis a full 45 degrees off kilter.

The lozenges are not his only departure from the comfort of gravity-bound perpendicularity. Celentano also serves up canvases shaped in circles, ovals, and spiraling globes. Across these different shapes he explores the theme of simulated motion radiating from or being sucked into a central vanishing point, as if by centrifugal or centripetal force. The circular Tri Global Spin Study I, II, and III, for example, are hung to simulate the motion of a spinning top. Six Radial Globes Opened evokes the gun-barrel sequences that open James Bond films, while Six Radial Globes Closed resembles the chambers of a nautilus. In the kaleidoscopic Diamond Displacement in Blue and Purple, lines that look as if they were once contiguous appear to have been fractured. The zebra-like swirls in Oval Counter Rotation recall ribbons of chocolate- and vanilla-flavored soft-serve ice cream, while Diamond Oblique Study in Blue and Red and Diamond Oblique Study in Blue and Green riff on the radiations of curved and straight lines. Across the gamut the pieces are vividly imagined and immaculately executed. Like photorealism, Op Art is often posited as an end in itself. Whether one views the fruits of Celentano's nearly five decades as an Op painter as etudes on pure opticality or as metaphors for the woozy vortexes of contemporary life, there is little doubt he has sustained his vision with remarkable tenacity and invention.