Bernard Frize: Faces et Profils,
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, 2 April - 28 May 28, 2005
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| Bernard Frize: Usine, 2005,
acrylic and resin on canvas, 150 x 150 cm; courtesy
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin |
Within contemporary abstract painting,
Bernard Frize's virtuoso canvases seem to provoke a welcome
variation on the ill-advised question 'what is it about?' that
is 'how is it done?' As with the best painting being produced
today, Frize's work has, for many years now, consistently yet
without turning into stale repetition, explored to great effect
a highly specific visual vocabulary. His works seem to be predicated
upon the same visual conceit: the interweaving of highly viscous
brushstrokes within whose final pattern the viewer becomes lost
in their attempt to locate the origin of gestures, the sophistication
of which being at odds with their apparent immediacy.
The brush, or in this case two or more
brushes held together like a bunch of flowers, each one loaded
with a different colour, produce(s) a pattern which intersects
itself without, apparently ever leaving the surface of the canvas.
A line produced in a certain direction appears to double back
at a later point and pass under itself. Lucid gestures duck
and weave under and over both each other and themselves, wet
into wet on a sumptuously satinated resin ground. The eye is
preoccupied from the first encounter with the deceptive simplicity
of what is being done. A line of a certain colour traverses
another of an entirely different colour and trajectory, now
crossing over, now below, without any great compromise to either
one. It is as though the painted lines have been braided and
woven in zero gravity, where their pigments are less inclined
to co-opt one another, and only once the order of their correspondence
has finally been decided upon that they are allowed to come
to rest on the canvas. The effect is reminiscent of a 3-D model
of DNA.
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| Bernard Frize: Diamant, 2005,
acrylic and resin on canvas, 190 x 190 cm; courtesy
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin |
It is no great relief to be given an
insight into how these works are produced. Frize employs a highly
choreographed method of painting that involves three assistants.
Following a series of guide pencil marks, which are incidentally
left visible in the final piece, the brushstrokes are worked
over each other in an astounding feat of timing. This information
only leaves us to wonder at the series of movements involved,
like listening to a ballet on the radio.
To anyone who has tried to repeat a
fluid effect with paint, the failures implicit in the task will
be familiar. These works, however, are about more than simply
a measured spontaneity. In a sense they could be termed durational.
They seem to record and hold time like a fly in amber. In this
case, the time in question is the moment of their production;
somehow they appear still wet, still active. This seems to be
achieved in part through the fluidity of the paint, worked onto
the ground while it is still damp. The network of painted lines
and stitches, by virtue of this fluidity, look as flexible as
woven cloth; an elegant mimicry of the canvas support. The canvas
weave itself, however, is almost concealed beneath a sensual
coat of resin. Without the grain of the support, the paint alone
serves to hold meaning within its complex weave.
If we are to read these surfaces in
terms of their immediacy, then this reading is necessarily disrupted
in the process of tracing the pattern and trajectory of the
brushstrokes. In this sense Frize has succeeded in making the
question 'how is it done?' equivalent to the question 'what
is it about?' Our search for meaning here becomes a matter of
production and deconstruction. The viewer may approach these
works in quite the same way they would approach a photorealist
painting. Both works become reducible to the level of technique.
If part of Frize's
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| Bernard Frize: Quatre fois trois.D,
2005, acrylic and resin on canvas, 130 x 115 cm;
courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin |
project is to point to a misdirected
interpretive impulse with regard to abstraction, that is, that
an abstraction somehow holds meaning in and of itself, then
it is a successful strategy.
The limited term 'process painting'
was coined to describe a certain type of work which foregrounded
ideas of production through the rigour of technique. Like a
long-running science experiment, it did not make claims for
itself beyond the physical evidence of canvas and paint. This
anodyne image of art as philosophical / scientific enquiry is
enhanced by mundane titles that read more like chemical formulae.
In critical terms the jargon surrounding abstract painting as
akin to some kind of alchemical process was replaced by a more
rational response.
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| creating a Bernard Frize painting:
image held here |
Of course if painting were really reducible
to a formula it would make for a bland enterprise. One of the
things good abstract work can demonstrate is that all painting
is 'process painting' and that painting in itself has as much
to do with articulating meaning as Newton's theory of gravity
has to do with apples. Whether or not the painted gesture actually
holds meaning, it is certain that in the work of Bernard Frize
it still holds wonder.
Robbie O'Halloran is an artist
based in Paris.
