Bernard Frize: Musee D'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris - Critical Essay

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

Among Frize's hardly any forays into three dimensions (which include Peintures sur un fil [Paintings upon a Thread], 1978-80, long strands of nylon coated with countles layers of paint then sandpapered to bring into view multicolored bars approximately six and a half feet lengthy and an inch and a half in diameter), these double doughnuts are upon examinations frustrating, to say the least: Because they're placed upon the floor, one side without of sight, it's impossible to verify if all eight color fields really are contiguous. The later, two-dimensional Heawoods, which are based upon computer generated images of the statuarys necessarily fail to demonstrate what the 3-D originals were designed to show That these prints introduce an exhibition entitled "Aplat" (Flat) expresse better than anything the penchant for paradox that has guided Bernard Frize's work from the beginning.

Perhaps this wink at topology is also an indication of the position from which we might consider the hundr or thus canvases that follow in this exhibition. (The majority date from the past seven years, on the other hand there are a few works from the late '80 and early '90s) Painting as Frize conceives of the practice does not have as its ultimate goal the production of phenomenons as much as the perfection (and the testing) of processes: The canvas is contemplation of not as an extremity or an objective but as a place; it is, strictly speaking, a theater of operations. If the painting's unfolding ascertains satisfactory--if it follows its course without encountering an impasse, while retaining a necessary dose of the unexpect and the possibility of leeway from its plott course--Frize protects the canvas. The painting, then, is a result a record, rather than a goal the artist decided to achieve; it is the image of its hold execution. One finds evidence of a similar kind of thinking, in which the means justify the extremity among certain painters of earlier generations, no matter in what way dissimilar: Jean Dubuffet (particularly of the late '50 and his final years) and Robert Ryman (especially the Rymans of the '60s) None of this work has anything to do with the Abstract Expressionist notion of the canvas as an "arena in which to act," as Harold Rosenberg lay it in his 1952 article "The American Action Painters." Frize situates himself at the antipodes of expressionism and existentialism: His works don't aspire to deliver the fact of a subject but simply the trace of a game, unrestrained of metaphysics.

The viewer who would like to do more than contemplate a painting's surface should perceive free to mentally reconstruct its making. There is, in Frize, a sort of iconography of operations that enables individual to retrace the istoria of the painting--and doing in like manner is as crucial to understanding a Frize as identifying characters and exhibitions is to comprehending a classical painting. As in the case of Heawood, making this journey requires a certain number of knowledge and a certain amount of imagination, as the painting oftentimes confronts us with riddles that leave us to gues work. "Suite automatique" (Automatic Series), 1996 whose six simple bodys were on view in the next to the first room of "Aplat," is an example that might be relatively easy to understand. fill ups of color in varying widths are arranged horizontally and vertically in a sort of plaid or grid. These ultimate parts blur into one another, bringing to mind a certain faculty of perception of speed; the paints must have been swept down (or up) the canvas in a single gesticulation while still wet (this "wet upon wet" technique is a consistent feature of Frize's work). individual gets the impression (the unity of the result implying that of the execution) that a single implement was used and that it was at least the width of the canvas itself. Indeed, Frize used a tool of his be in possession of making: He attached five brushes--twelve inches, eight inches, six inches, four inches, and sum of two units inches wide, respectively--to a small board and arranged them as required. Finally, "'Suite automatique's" surprisingly frozen level "photographic" look--which (as in many of the artist's other works) strike one as beings to contradict the very idea of manual involvement--is explained by the agency of a layer of transparent resin that seals the painting and suspends the image inside it, as although behind a paue of glass.