BERNARD FRIZE

Perrotin Tokyo and Kaikai Kiki Gallery are happy to present two
concurrent solo shows of French painter Bernard Frize, in advance
of his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou - Musée National d’Art
Moderne in Paris (29 May - 26 August 2019, curator Angela Lampe).
Featuring a wide range of paintings, including new productions,
these exhibitions mark the return of the artist in Japan, 13 years after
the group show « Essential painting » at the National Museum of
Osaka.
«While regularly revisiting various moments of his past practice, Frize
has never stopped exploring new concepts, inventing novel ways to
paint (starting with the development, 10 years ago, of processes
based on the creation of one painting by multiple people
simultaneously), but he has also, since the mid-1990s, abandoned
all recourse to what we summarize as “figurative art,” namely the
representation of real and identifiable objects or images. It is only by
accident or allusion, and by a natural predisposition of our vision, that
we perceive this or that painting as evoking a stone, a curtain or a
bookshelf. So much so that this action of expansion that first strikes
us corresponds to another, of reduction or of disconnection. The
paradox is far-reaching and leads immediately to the Frize’s
conception of painting since the beginning, which is to constitute it
of an ensemble of paradoxes, in other words of propositions contrary to common sense and expectation. Of course, the principle
applies at the level of each work considered individually: “I always try
to get to the point where there is not just one thing in the
painting, one thing shown, but that there is a paradox, an
antagonism, a difficulty in the work.”1
“I try to make paintings that one can look at least twice. I would also
say that I try as much as possible to articulate the processes
amongst themselves, to recycle the remains of one series for the
benefit of another. The monochrome that is drying over there is an
example: at one point I put a canvas beneath it so that the drops
that fall from it provide me with the beginning of another painting.”2
These words, spoken by Frize more than 20 years ago, have just as
much pertinence today. Since then his work has continued to grow
using the same autodidactic method. Considering the many avenues
he has explored, one of the questions he certainly now faces is
that of a renewed, deliberate use of distinctly figurative motifs. In
an interview published in Artforum, he remarked on this point: “The
figurative pieces I’ve done, the ones that are paintings in the strict
sense—not the photographs or scanachromes— are, it seems to me,
even more ambiguous than the abstract ones. In the figurative the
images function as a sort of primary material that I use without
worrying about their references, or else they are used to play with
the idea of hidden figuration, of double meaning. In any case, I
have never invented an image, I can only paint one in order to put it
to use in a demonstration of pictorial order. When, for example, I
returned periodically to painting images of pots, I did so in order
to work on the idea of ‘failure,’ to accentuate, via the image, a
certain exploitation of accident that I was trying to get to. So, for
example, I would cover the surface of the painting with “crazing”
varnish, or I would paint the image itself out of register. I was
trying to represent in the clearest way possible a certain inadequacy, the fact that nothing fits in these pictures.”
3
That
there is still much to invent from such a conception of the image is
more than likely, especially if one takes into account the way in which
all sorts of illicit figurations haunt numerous paintings of Frize’s that can
rightly be called “abstract.” In the course of his entire body of work, the
logic would be that of an expansion of figurative exploration, through a
revitalization of “pictorial intelligence.“
4
»
Jean-Pierre Criqui, extract of « Bernard Frize Today », in Bernard Frize,
Perrotin, 2014.
Jean-Pierre Criqui is the Curator of The Musée National d’Art Moderne
– Contemporary Collections, and Chief Editor of Les Cahiers du Mnam.