Bernard FRIZE

For over forty years Bernard Frize has been inventing procedures for making paintings without exactly knowing or predicting the visual outcome. He has explained that the process of painting is more important than whether the final result is aesthetically pleasing, although it turns out that they often are. By establishing procedures he removes himself as best he can from the work, to reduce the sense of self-expression to the barest minimum. As an artist who began working in the 1970s, at the height of minimal and conceptual art, he was, of course, aware of such artists as Sol LeWitt, whose ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ first appeared in Artforum in Summer 1967, but Frize’s approach was different. LeWitt, for the most part, did not execute his work but left it to assistants. Frize required assistance in executing one series of paintings when he needed many hands to manipulate brushes simultaneously, but mostly he makes art on his own. His hand is therefore involved. Whereas LeWitt described his work as emotionally dry, because from his point of view it was executed as though by a machine, Frize’s work is cool but can provoke an emotional response. LeWitt’s art was manufactured industrially or drawn on a wall. Frize makes paintings on canvas with visible brush marks where colour is embedded in a resin surface. It has the illusion of facture, although none whatsoever. Moreover there is a strong sense of wit and the absurd in Frize’s work. LeWitt was not immune to absurdity – think of his Location pieces where the text describing the actions to be taken to execute a simple geometric figure, such as a triangle or a square, is so complex that it requires quite a strong logical mind to decode it. The mental effort required to draw a simple form is enormous. This mixture of complexity and simplicity, of detail and ludicrous outcome was comparable in many ways to the novels of the nouveau roman movement.