Large Fragment 2 by Bridget Riley is built from a small number of broad, curving forms in hot pink, cobalt blue and vermilion that sweep across the picture in opposing diagonals, the scale of each element large enough that the eye moves within individual shapes as much as between them. The three colours sit at full saturation against one another, with no modulation or transition — the blue holding back where the warmer tones press forward, the contrast between them generating a depth and restlessness that the structure alone does not explain.

Riley had always resisted the Op Art label applied to her work from the 1960s onwards, finding it reductive — a description that reduced what she was investigating to a trick of the eye rather than a sustained inquiry into how colour and form act on perception. The distinction mattered to her. Where Op Art implied novelty and effect, Riley's ambitions were rooted in the same questions that had occupied Cézanne, Seurat and Matisse — how a painting builds its reality through relationships rather than representation, how the eye constructs what it sees rather than simply receiving it. In Large Fragment 2 those relationships are pared to their minimum: three colours, a handful of forms, and the tension between them carrying everything the image needs.

Large Fragment 2 is characteristic of Riley's approach to naming — it proposes the work as a section of something larger rather than a self-contained composition, the forms continuing beyond each edge as though the image could extend indefinitely in any direction. That quality of incompleteness is not a limitation but part of the logic, the fragment holding together precisely because the system that generates it is coherent enough to be trusted beyond what is shown.

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