BERNARD FRIZE, Rely, 2010 , Acrylic and resin on canvas, 241 x 210 cm,

94 7/8 x 82 5/8 in.

Pox, 2010 , Acrylic and resin on canvas, 241 x 210 cm, 94 7/8 x 82 5/8 in.
Raim, 2010 , Acrylic and resin on canvas, 241 x 210 cm, 94 7/8 x 82 5/8 in.

Tara, 2010 , Acrylic and resin on canvas, 241 x 210 cm, 94 7/8 x 82 5/8 in.
Malbux, 2010 , Acrylic and resin on canvas, 186 x 186 cm, 73 1/4 x 73 1/4 in.

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Red, Yellow and Blue, its second show
of new paintings by highly regarded French artist Bernard Frize.

The title of the show, Red, Yellow and Blue is a reference to Barnett
Newman’s series of four paintings entitled Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and
Blue (circa1966). In this series Newman uses the three colours in their most
basic, primary hues, and arranges colour-fields intended to immerse the
viewer. Newman’s series consisted of large expanses of vibrant red would be
punctuated by vertical “zips” of blue and yellow.

Barnett Newman is well known for his decision to strip away much of the
Modernist constructs of painting, and follow in a similar vein to fellow abstract
expressionists, focusing on redefining the medium and its parameters.
Bernard Frize has been influenced by Newman’s approach throughout his
career. Since the 1970s, Frize has escaped traditional modes of painting,
disregarding figurative and compositional subject matter, to focus on the
reduction of painting to the physical act itself. Frize focuses on the mechanics
of painting, and paints in series, following strict rules, and using specific colour
palettes.
Frize’s works can be seen as documentation of choreographed acts of
painting, often involving many people at once. In previous series Frize has set
rules and used elaborate technical processes. The outcome of the work is
determined by the process in which it is made, and much is left to chance.

This collection of new work is no different, the resulting “almost ready-mades”

are the products of conversations between various pre-existing objects – the
canvas, the brush, and the paint. Frize regards each of these objects as tools,
and himself a labourer. His simplistic approach to painting often results in
striking and powerful images, with bold colours and sumptuous textures.
There is no narrative to speak of but there is often directionality to the
brushstrokes, which provide a sense of movement and time. The works are
rich, layered and mysterious in their conception.

Bernard Frize was born in 1949 in Saint Mandé, France. He lives and works
between Paris and Berlin. He has work in numerous public collections,
including: The Tate Gallery, London; MUMOK, Vienna; Museo Nacional
Centro de Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;
and the Kunstmuseums, Basel and Zurich.

He has exhibited extensively both in Europe and in the United States

including exhibitions at Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France;
Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst Landkreis, Cuxhaven, Germany;
Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster,
Germany; Gemeente Museum, La Haye, Holland; S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium;
Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland; The Bakersfield Museum
of Art and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, USA.

The art of french painter bernard frize

the paintings of bernard frize use line in abstractions that allow

surprising complexity in terms of colour, facture, width and intersection.
they stretch the definition of line.

since the end of the seventies, when painting was according to

many people as good as dead, frize was working consistently
on a body of work that seemed to reduce painting to its most pure
and trivial essence: the application of colour and of paint on a support.
although recognition of his work was a long time coming, he
succeeded in giving painting a new impulse and influencing
a whole generation of painters.

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.

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.

bernard frize (1949) lives and works in paris.

'suit a onze nr. 14', 2006

Bernard Frize: Faces et Profils, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, 2 April - 28

May 28, 2005
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.
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
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
inquiry 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.

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.

An exhibition of his painting will be on show at the Lemonstreet Gallery, Dublin in September.

Bernard Frize
Frith Street Gallery, London
Frieze, Issue 26, Jan-Feb 1996

This exhibition comprises a new series of paintings supplemented

with three examples from other bodies of work and an early
painting from Frize's very first series. One of the new pieces, 46%
Vrai - 53% Faux (1986-95), is a one-stroke painting: Frize
strapped together seven three-centimetre brushes, each loaded
with a different coloured paint, and slowly dragged them around
the canvas. The painting's logic seems to be to cover as much of
the surface as possible, but only by travelling vertically and
horizontally, and without overlap. This dumb idea is made
interesting through two features: firstly, the canvas has been
primed with a thick layer of resin and hence, disconcertingly, has a
smooth plastic surface. Secondly, the motion of the brush has
been carefully considered: the pencil construction lines that the
gesture follows are still visible, and the changes in direction are
made by pivoting the implement around one of its ends. This
produces curious effects at the centre of the swing and makes it
impossible not to imagine the process happening in real time - we
picture the brush right there before us, with its excruciating snail's
pace and ever-paler rainbow trail.

The other works in the series expand this technique. After

imaginatively living through the creation of this painting, with all of
its 'I could do that' connotations, we are faced with Aran (1992), in
which we realise that we most definitely could not do that. Here,
the process is taken further by the fact that the whole surface is
filled with continuous brush strokes which, because of Frize's
proficiency, appear like psychedelic islands among perceptual
ripples: Op art meets spaced-out techno graphics. Following the
strokes on this one is like trying to follow speeding Scalectrix cars
- the kind with the special over-taking manoeuvres - round a track.
It's not actually an impossible task, but close to it. Following Aran
is a cohesive set of five works in which the initial, one-stroke
premise is carried out again. The show culminates with the
colossal Spitz (1991), a tour de force in which everything is taken
too far and the multi-coloured paints run into each other,
mysteriously dripping towards the centre of the canvas. Like a star
that has grown too large and collapsed under its own gravity, this
painting goes beyond the limitations of technique and so breaks
down, tested to destruction - would we be happy with anything
less?

Frize's idea of the one-stroke painting, coupled with the setting out
of the painting's method before lifting the brush, strongly suggests
a conceptual framework for the series. And yet, one thing that we
can be certain of is that these are definitely not Conceptual
paintings. Frize allows the materials sufficient reign that not only
do they run away from him, but all the associations do too - give
them an inch and they'll take a mile. But why do these paintings
prove so difficult to forget? Is it because the sweetly naughty
associations wriggle free, exactly mirroring the material's
insistence on dribbling off and blending in whatever manner takes
its fancy?

One of the features of what has been termed Classic Conceptual

Art (early Art & Language, Joseph Kosuth...) is that it always has
an inescapable relationship with language, often through the
simple positioning of text against an image as a way of positing
pseudo-philosophical 'insights'. In other words, by reducing the
importance of the image in visual arts and relying upon a linguistic
proposition, the artist will soon find that they have encroached on
a way of producing meaning that is the domain of another
profession. That is: Conceptual work constructs its meaning in the
viewer's mind as a logical linguistic argument - even if that
linguistic form is not actually a recognisable spoken language.
Essentially, the viewer pieces together the work's elements to
construct a formal argument, or at least a proposition. Once
'solved', the physical work can be forgotten about until such time
as it may be used to quote from. Further attention will not bring to
light further insights. Philosophy has its own historical terminology
and structured thought systems which you can easily find yourself
tangled up in if you insist on straying. However, the fact that
Kosuth's work does not cut it as a philosophy is not to say that it
does not cut it as art: limits must be explored, it's just that once
found, they ought to be respected.

This is not a negative judgement against Conceptual art, the point

is just that Frize's paintings simply do not function in this manner.
Confusion arises not because they should operate in this way but
because the form they take suggests that they will operate in this
way. We are primed for a certain kind of work and don't get it.
Frize doesn't do the things we think that he ought to: he does not
pare down the variables in his method to the extent that a rigorous
investigation of paint would demand, like, say, a chemist at
Windsor & Newton, or a reductivist British painter might. In this
sense, Frize fails badly. But that's our problem, not his.

In fact, Frize ignores the linguistic structures that we expect from

Conceptualism - small wonder, then, that Friedrich Meschede
entitles his catalogue essay to Frize's Kunstverein Arnsberg show
'Painting Without Language'. Frize produces images that are
essentially irresolvable, somehow incomprehensible. This is
because he deliberately leaves in his paintings an element that
does not work, as he himself has stated. In a sense, when the
paint dribbles happily out of control, so does the textual logic: like
the letters that tumble into a pile at the bottom of a virus-infected
computer screen. Perhaps this is what makes Frize's 'conceptually
sloppy' artwork - the fact that we feel guilty and nonplussed for
enjoying it. They may not be Conceptual, but Frize's dumb
paintings ain't so dumb.

text
 copyright
david
barrett

Bernard Frize Gets Hands On At Birmingham's Ikon Gallery

| 12 June 2003

Hands On is the UK's first comprehensive exhibition of work by French artist

Bernard Frize and it's at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham until July 20.

Known for his impressive stylistic and technical diversity, visitors have the rare
opportunity to see a combination of Frize's sculpture, photography and recent
painting.

A collection of vivid, colourful works, it is perhaps his painting that best

demonstrates the artist's technique.

Heawood (dessus), plastic. Bernard Frize, 1999.

With paint as the main ingredient, Frize suggests that his method is one of
making recipes, a question of process and discovery, controlling chance,
arranging colour with simple brush strokes.

Taking the act of creation down to a basic level, the paint is often dragged or
drawn across the canvas to reveal a range of effects. This method is usually
collaborative, involving a number of people, while the crucial decisions are
made by Frize himself.

Apparently simple canvases, the clarity of the works draws the viewer into the
process of their creation, opening the artist's technique up to his audience.
The sculpture on show in the exhibition takes on a similar ethic of colourful
simplicity. Two three-dimensional figure-eights sit, like a knot at the centre of
the space, their design arranged so that portions of eight colours on one lie
adjacent to the same colours on the other.

Alva, acrylic, resin. Bernard Frize, 2002.

Most interestingly, it is through his photographic works that Frize offers the
greatest clue to the sources of inspiration for his work as a whole.

While there is a certain deliberateness to the images, the overbearing sense

is of a response to incidental and unplanned phenomena.

In one image, a series of multi-coloured garage doors almost perfectly mirrors

the obviously structured, yet somehow unplanned colour schemes of his other
work.

Suite au Rouleau
16 February- 27 March 1994

Bernard Frize, Suite au Rouleau, 1994, Installation view

Suite au Rouleau is a series of eight new paintings. Each was made with a
paint roller, such as those used for interior decoration. Layers of paint were
applied to the surface, giving the impression of opalescence. The artist
arbitrarily assigned different colours to each layer. The layers were applied at
different angles, rotating forty-five degrees clockwise for each successive
layer so that the succession was discernable.

The rigorous procedure followed by Frize in these paintings was foiled by the
spontaneity in his use of the roller and in the wetness and translucency of the
paint, resulting in layers bleeding into one another. The painted surface traces
the artist’s movement around it, embodying the smallest variation in pressure
and speed with which the paint is applied. It records the means to its own end,
particularly in the order in which the layers are put down.

The paintings depict themselves with an emphasis on the way they were
made. However, rather than leading the viewer into a self-referential dead-
end, they open up the established practice of paintings to new alternatives.
Frize brings an extraordinary inventiveness to painting through conventional
materials and tools.

Bernard Frize was born 1954, Saint Mande, France. Frize's artworks have
been exhibited extensively across Europe and the U.K., as well as recently in
the United States. He is represented by the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in
Paris and Miami, Simon Lee in London, and Patrick Painter Inc. in Los
Angeles. Frize lives and works in Paris, and Berlin.

What is the greatest number of color fields that can be arranged so that each
maintains a border with all others? Bernard Frize's Heawood, 1999, a pair of
painted sculptures in tire permanent collection of the MAMVP, and Heawood,
2003, the thirteen digital prints that introduce this show of the artist's mostly
recent paintings, address this thorny question. The works' namesake, British
mathematician Percy John Heawood, labored over this and related problems
(which originated in cartography) in the years surrounding the turn of the last
century; at one point, exploring three dimensional forms, he determined that
no more than eight fields of color can abut one another on the surface of a
double torus (a volume shaped, in accidental analogy, exactly like a three-
dimensional figure eight). The twin Heawood sculptures are based on this
formula.

Among Frize's few forays into three dimensions (which include Peintures sur
un fil [Paintings on a Thread], 1978-80, long strands of nylon coated with
countless layers of paint then sandpapered to produce multicolored bars
approximately six and a half feet long and an inch and a half in diameter),
these double doughnuts are on examinations frustrating, to say the least:
Because they're placed on the floor, one side out of sight, it's impossible to
verify if all eight color fields really are contiguous. The later, two-dimensional
Heawoods, which are based on computer generated images …
It is a contemporary cliche: the painter who frenetically switches modes, so as
to undermine the ideal of stylistic identity. Bernard Frize's paintings, at first
glance, give the impression of this kind of extreme heterogeneity, but while his
work may follow no regular, easily parsed progression, neither is it animated
by a kind of Brownian movement that deprives it of all structure. Rather, this
work reveals an order that is both branching and discontinuous, like a network
of echoes and resurgences.

The principal difficulty of Frize's oeuvre derives from the fact that the kinship
among individual paintings or groups of works is not one of appearance but of
method. To take a simple example, consider the works in the "Lacquers"
series (begun in 1990) in relation to the paintings from the 1980 "Suite
Segond." To make one of the "Lacquers," Frize blends paints of various colors
in a box, lets the surface dry, then sticks this hardened skin to a canvas.
Wrapped around the deep stretcher bars, the sheet of congealed paint fits the
canvas in one piece. In the second series, Frize opens cans of paint, waits for
the surfaces to dry, and applies the hardened disks that form there to canvas
in random accumulations. In spite of their procedural similarities, the two
series could not appear more different.

Here we find the principle of disjunction characteristic of Frize's work. This

attraction to visual oppositions corresponds to a taste--sometimes indulged to
the point of absurdity--for the displaced or incongruous. For Frize, a good
painting is one in which something that "doesn't work" is conserved in all the
power of its irresolution, in all its interlocutory tension. The recent large-format
paintings combining

Several years ago, I came across a rather blunt exhortation in a Finnish

magazine: "Hey, all you abstract painters. What you're doing isn't interesting.
So just stop? These words have been ringing in my ears ever since, and most
of the time they seem pretty judicious. But occasionally something turns up
that makes me think twice - like Bernard Frize's recent "herringbone"
paintings. What intrigues me isn't so much Frize's detached, industrial
approach or his attempt to reduce "creation" to chance and mechanics, but
rather the transparency of his method: Once one gets the process, one also
appreciates the struggle the artist has been through.

In Type, 1998, tributaries of bright color from the left side of the canvas lead to
a central axis, where they converge in a diagonal river …