ART-PRESENTATION: Bernard Frize-Now or Never
For more than 40 years, Bernard Frize, who currently divides his time between Paris and Berlin, has been constantly questioning pictorial practices and the role of the painter. At a time marked by virtuality and moving images, he is committed to examining the challenges of painting in a way few of his contemporaries do.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Perrotin Gallery Archive
Featuring a wide range of paintings, including new productions, Bernard Frize’s solo exhibition “Now or Never”, at Perrotin Gallery mark 25 years of collaboration between the artist and the gallery. It was in the mid 1970’s, at a time when painting was regarded by many of his contemporaries as being obsolete that Bernard Frize began to focus his attention exclusively on the act of painting. His abstract compositions derived from elaborately constructed rules, carefully choreographed performances which determined entirely the works’ formal composition. In one early series Frize peeled off the colored skins from pots of paint left open in the studio and applied them over the surface of the canvas, the wet paint on the disks’ undersides acting as adhesive. More recent compositions involve teams of assistants moving their linked brushes across a wet white ground, and like the participants in a maypole dance, mixing colors and forming interweaving bands of color as they go. According to the artist, his paintings are not the expression of a “creative ego” but follow a formal policy that he imposes on himself: “there is no place for sensations or feelings here”. Bernard Frize advocates a technical, banal, sometimes preposterous, and oftentimes absurd, process in opposition to the demiurgic gesture that he condemns. While he is mainly known for his serial abstract and conceptual paintings, Bernard Frize has also incorporated figurative elements in his works since the 1980s. Consequently, in order to highlight the multiple pictorial investigations behind each work, paintings that are part of the same series will be exhibited in different sections, each accompanied by a commentary from the artist. No mark betrays the painter’s gesture. The body of ornamental artworks thus stands out within his overall work, which, from the outset, has been based on performativity. The act of tracing a continuous line that is drained of its pigments onto the canvas stems from the idea not only of recording the length of application, but also of presenting the pictorial event in a fully transparent way. Refusing to do any subsequent work or touch-up on his paintings, which are created in a single, unrepentant session, Frize affirms a work ethic. The viewer can follow the brushstroke as it is depleted, before it is reborn with a new load of paint, and so on. Staging endless lines refers to the practice of open seriality in Frize’s work. The rule involving the creation of variants generated from a protocol gives him the motivation, as he says, “to avoid getting sidetracked, to enable me to keep going”. In other words, it is the constraint that liberates him from any personal decision.
Info: Perrotin Gallery, 76 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 18/5-24/8/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.perrotin.com
