Brouillard (1981) by Bridget Riley runs narrow vertical stripes across a large near-square format, the palette softer and more diffuse than the contemporaneous Edge of Light — rose, mauve, ochre, sky blue, pale turquoise and lavender sitting in close proximity, the dark bands present but fewer and less dominant, the whole field carrying the hazy, atmospheric quality that the French title — meaning fog or mist — proposes.

The word brouillard points toward something Riley would not usually allow a title to do — describe the visual experience of the work directly as opposed to leaving it open. That she used it here suggests a particular confidence in the correspondence between the palette and the atmospheric condition it names, the closely related tones producing a softness and indistinctness that sharper chromatic contrasts would immediately dispel. It connects her, unexpectedly, to the Impressionist painters she had studied at length — to Monet's series of the Thames at dawn, the fog paintings in which colour and atmosphere become indistinguishable from one another, the image built from the quality of light in place of from the objects it falls on. Riley's means are entirely different and her intentions more abstract, but the understanding that colour can carry atmosphere without depicting it is shared.

Brouillard is from the remarkably productive year in which Riley's stripe work, the three prints together demonstrating how widely different moods and spatial effects the same vertical format could generate through chromatic choice alone — each one a distinct answer to the same structural question.

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