Bernard Frize: Fluid Phantasms

Vibrant, resin-sealed surfaces conceal any hint of a signature style: Bernard Frize’s conceptual paintings show remarkable inventiveness, exploring an industrial, quasi-mechanical approach to art production.

Born in 1949 in Saint-Mandé, France, Frize now divides his time between Paris and Berlin. His powerfully dynamic works often unfold in series, where neither the expressive potential of the materials nor the artist’s personal style take centre stage. Instead, Frize constantly experiments with techniques, materials and tools, adopting an industrial and mechanical approach to creation. The subjective artistic process fades into the background, allowing Frize to assume the role of observer, transforming his painting into an act of letting things happen and emerge organically.

Asked what excites him most about painting, the French artist Bernard Frize once remarked: “There are many, many different ways to arrive at a painting. […] I can consider, for example, whether I make a painting the way I spread butter on my breakfast roll or the way I arrange flowers in a vase. That’s how it feels when I’m painting with 15 brushes in my hand – it’s the same process. Each flower has its own colour, and the colours on my brush are often ones I’m not even all that familiar with.”

Mona, coming up for sale in Dorotheum’s Contemporary Art auction, is one of four large-scale works created for a solo exhibition in Zurich in 1993. It is the first work from this series to appear on the auction market. Each work takes its title from four-letter codes used for Paris city trains: Romi, Vony, Vick and Mona. The resin base of Mona is painted with broad brushstrokes, giving rise to a fluid blend of dispersion, resin and ink in a candy pink monochrome. Frize turns the picture support on its head, so that the thin, horizontal, transparent veils of colour begin to take on a life of their own. Before us unfolds a hallucinatory, almost mineral-landscape-like phantasm – and yet it is only abstract material. A respirating field taking effect from within.

“It’s quite a complex thing, arranging situations in which you yourself do nothing and instead let things happen on their own,” Frize says, reflecting on the role of chance. What could be more idiosyncratic – and refreshing – than startling inventiveness, combined with an elegant sense of control.