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For over forty years, Bernard Frize has examined what it means to make a painting. Working in series, he has developed diverse protocols in order to undermine his own creative role and thus free his compositions of self-expression. For Frize, paint, resin, brush and canvas are not materials to be mastered, but collaborators with whom he enters into a working relationship. The terms of this partnership may vary from series to series, but ever-constant is the notion that the media itself is equally as important as the hand of the artist in determining the look and feel of a final painting. Subtle in some works and significant in others, the drips, pools, swirls, and blobs of paint found throughout Frize’s large colorful abstractions evidence his anti-auteur relationship to painting. Preferring to raise questions rather than provide answers, Frize invites viewers to consider the implications of process and materials (what is painting) on form and content (what is a painting).
OMENA, 2023
Acrylic and resin on canvas
150 x 130 cm | 59 1/16 x 51 3/16 inch
Unique
Bernard Frize’s paintings are neither narrative nor mutilated, but they owe their creation, in large part, to a kind of sanctioned degeneration. Unruly paint has been allowed to bleed over the artist’s own brushwork, complicating systematic strokes with smudges, swathes and stains whose amorphous hazy forms that suggest various celestial bodies. Managing to appear simultaneously vibrant and on the brink of ruin, the canvas reflects Frize’s complex and ever-evolving relationship to paint, the act of painting and what it means to be a painter.
Recently I visited a neurologist, she stood the same height as I do except she stood in designer black loafers. For the entire appointment I tried to place her accent and landed somewhere eastern European. After probing me and testing my reflexes, she said before leaving the room, “Straighten your posture, speak to someone about your prolonged black mold exposure, and stretch often. Goodbye.” I almost wept that she was wrong and she needed to do more tests. I wanted to point to what hurt and have her inject it or snap it back into place but I didn’t know what to point to. So, I said “Thank you very much, goodbye.”