Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You thought that abstract painting had nothing left to teach us after abstract expressionism, after minimalism, after this last decade of ready-to-post painting on Instagram? Bernard Frize proves you wrong with an elegance so casual that it becomes almost insulting.
Frize is that rare artist who dared to do what almost no one else had the guts to try: invent a totally new way of creating images. And the most brilliant part? He claims to invent nothing at all. “It’s not my personal ego that I expose in my painting,” he says. “No one is interested in my ego.” [1] A refreshing modesty in a world where, nowadays, every canvas dauber thinks they are the reincarnation of Michelangelo.
Frize’s work is a walking paradox, treading a fine line between constraint and freedom, between determinism and chance. He establishes rigorous rules, precise protocols, then lets the painting take over, flow where it wants. It’s as if a chess player decided to follow the rules perfectly but refused to have a strategy. The result? Smooth, shiny, hypnotic surfaces that suck you into their chromatic vortex before you even realize what’s happening.
In a series like “Suite Segond”, Frize let drips of industrial paint collect circular crusts formed on the surface, which he then placed on canvas. A painting that practically generates itself, with minimal intervention. It’s a conceptual stroke of genius that would have made Duchamp green with envy. But it’s not some gratuitous Dadaist gesture, it’s a profound questioning of what constitutes the act of painting.
Frize’s approach strangely echoes the composer John Cage, who let chance determine the structure of his musical compositions. Like Cage with his random scores, Frize invents systems that generate unpredictable results. In “4’33″”, Cage asks the musicians not to play their instrument for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds, letting the ambient sounds of the environment constitute the work. Similarly, Frize sets up strict constraints to then allow external forces, gravity, the viscosity of the paint, the chemical properties of the pigments, to complete the work. [2]
Cage’s silence is never truly silent, and Frize’s empty canvases are never truly empty. His painting “Emir”, for example, where he tried to separate an emulsion of two colors, suddenly reveals the illusion of a traditional Chinese landscape through vertical stripes. Like Cage who said: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it,” Frize could assert: “I have nothing to paint and I paint it.” [3]
This methodical yet chance-embracing approach echoes Cage’s music, which was structured yet unpredictable. Cage used methods like the I Ching to make compositional decisions, creating scores that were both rigorously determined and completely random. Similarly, Frize establishes strict protocols that then allow for the intervention of chance. “Most of the time, my paintings are very simple and anyone could do them. There is nothing special about their subject,” he states with a false modesty that hides a deep truth. [4]
Frize and Cage share this desire to erase their subjectivity from the work. Cage declares: “I have set myself the task of removing intention,” while Frize says: “I strive to make a painting with the fewest decisions possible.” [5] This voluntary absence of the artist opens a space where the work can breathe and exist by itself, without the weight of the creative ego.
What I admire about Frize is that he does not just apply this philosophy, he pushes it to its breaking point. In his paintings like “Bork” from 2018, he creates a complex braiding pattern by dragging transparent jewel tones on the canvas with a thick brush. The result is both methodical and chaotic, ordered and disordered. He establishes a modernist grid, then lets the paint do what it wants. [6]
And that’s where the fundamental tension of his work lies: between order and disorder, between control and abandon. His paintings are like perfectly maintained Zen gardens where a few weeds have been deliberately allowed to grow. Or like a Mozart symphony played by an orchestra where each musician is slightly out of tune.
In his work “Spitz”, he fills the surface of a canvas with a single stroke made with a bouquet of 15 brushes, following the movements of a composition drawn from a geometry manual tracing all possible displacements of a knight on a chessboard. [7] It’s as if John Cage had decided to compose a Bach fugue, but letting the piano gradually go out of tune during the performance.
Frize’s approach also recalls the literature of the OuLiPo, that group of French writers who imposed arbitrary yet fertile literary constraints on themselves. Like Georges Perec writing “La Disparition”, an entire novel without using the letter ‘e’, Frize imposes pictorial constraints that, paradoxically, liberate his creativity rather than limiting it. [8]
Perec created monumental works from apparently impossible restrictions, his masterpiece “La Vie mode d’emploi” is built on a complex system of mathematical constraints. Similarly, Frize uses rules and protocols to generate works of surprising beauty. “Constraints do not restrict me, they liberate me and force me to be creative,” he could say, echoing the OuLiPo creed. [9]
In his novel “La Disparition”, Perec had to invent new ways of expressing ideas without ever using the most common letter of the French language. This restriction gave birth to a strange, twisted but wonderfully inventive prose. Frize, in a similar way, forbids himself certain traditional painterly actions, such as choosing colors by personal taste or expressing an emotion, which forces him to find alternative ways to create fascinating images. [10]
For the OuLiPo, constraint was not an obstacle but a catalyst. Raymond Queneau, one of the group’s founders, wrote “Exercices de style”, telling the same banal anecdote in 99 different ways. This methodical exploration of possibilities recalls Frize’s series, where he exhausts all possible variations of the same pictorial approach. [11]
“I am not good at unique paintings; I need to warm up and experiment through several similar paintings,” explains Frize. “Focusing on a series also allows me to find an end and a way out. Repetition offers me the possibility to practice what I want to do and, at the same time, opens a path to start the next series.” [12] Like an OuLiPo writer who would explore all possible permutations of a constraint before moving on to the next one.
This serial method is perfectly illustrated in the installation he presented at Perrotin: five identical square canvases, each divided into thirty-six squares with a red or green pencil before being painted. The slight variations in the application of the paint from one canvas to another produced compositions ranging from a patchwork of neatly arranged pastel cubes (“Epa”, 2018) to a vibrant and dripping madras (“Buc”, 2018). [13]
What I love about Frize is his ability to create works that seem both extremely calculated and completely spontaneous. As if a computer had been programmed to improvise jazz. His canvases are visual algorithms that allow for error, accident, the unpredictable. And it is precisely this tension that makes them so hypnotic.
The work “Aran” (1992) presents continuous traces that, thanks to Frize’s technical mastery, appear as psychedelic waves among perceptual undulations. Following the traces on this canvas is like trying to follow race cars, the kind with special overtaking maneuvers, on a track. It’s not really an impossible task, but almost. [14]
In his most recent works, such as “Gise” (2023), Frize paints two peaks at the top and bottom of the canvas. These incandescent paintings evoke dreamlike landscapes, but for Frize, the importance of these paintings lies in their technical differences, ranging from the color palette to the varied brushstrokes. [15] Like an Oulipian writer exploring all possible variations of the same constraint.
One could argue that this methodical approach is cold, detached, intellectual. But that is to forget the extraordinary sensuality of his surfaces. His canvases shine like wet candies, their dripping colors inviting touch (don’t do it, museum guards wouldn’t appreciate it). Frize has found a way to create visually seductive works without falling into the trap of personal expression or good taste.
It is interesting to see how Frize applies this philosophy of “non-choice” even to his palette. He always uses the same eight colors, two blues, two reds, two yellows, etc., which offer him enough combinations that he sees no interest in changing them. “Most of the time, I only paint with five or six colors. They are very pure, so they mix and allow all the necessary variations,” he explains. [16]
His complicated relationship with color, his canvases are saturated with multiple shades, but he can hardly be called a colorist, is yet another paradox that defines his work. Swearing by an indifference to color, he rejects it as a vehicle for expression, yet it has become his trademark. “I don’t think painting is a matter of taste,” he says. “I noticed that a collector simply matched his curtains with the color of my painting. This kind of decoration did not interest me.” [17]
This nonchalant attitude towards aesthetics is refreshing in an art world that often evaluates works based on their beauty. Frize couldn’t care less whether his paintings are beautiful or not, which, by a strange twist of fate, often makes them magnificent. It’s like those people who are sexy precisely because they don’t care about their appearance.
Frize’s work reminds us that painting is not dead, but that it needs to be constantly reinvented. As he himself says: “Some people decided, as a coup de force and a political game, that painting was dead in the 1970s. But the painters resisted this edict, and in fact, it never died.” [18]
What makes Bernard Frize so captivating is this perpetual dance between constraint and freedom, between method and chance, between detachment and sensuality. Like a jazz player who knows his musical theory perfectly but knows when to deviate from it, Frize is a master of control and abandon. “I have always thought that the exercise of painting is the management of contradictions,” he says. “The more paradoxes there are, the more interesting the painting becomes.” [19]
And that’s exactly what makes his work so fascinating to look at and contemplate. In a world obsessed with certainties, fixed identities and clear definitions, Bernard Frize offers us the gift of ambiguity, contradiction and paradox. And for that, bunch of snobs, we should all be grateful to him.
- Forbes, “For French Artist Bernard Frize, Painting Is All About Not Making Choices And Not Expressing Himself,” 2019.
- John Cage, “Silence: Lectures and Writings,” Wesleyan University Press, 1961.
- Ibid.
- Forbes, op. cit.
- Ocula Magazine, “Bernard Frize on the Contradictions of Painting,” 2019.
- Artforum, “Bernard Frize,” 2019.
- Forbes, op. cit.
- Georges Perec, “La Disparition,” Gallimard, 1969.
- Marcel Bénabou, “Règle et contrainte,” Pratiques, n° 39, 1983.
- Ocula Magazine, op. cit.
- Raymond Queneau, “Exercices de style,” Gallimard, 1947.
- Ocula Magazine, op. cit.
- Artforum, op. cit.
- Frieze, “Bernard Frize,” 1996.
- Artsy, “New Artist Spotlight: Bernard Frize at Marian Goodman Gallery,” 2024.
- Ocula Magazine, op. cit.
- Forbes, op. cit.
- Moussemagazine, “I’m Trying All the Angles to Get to the Painting: Bernard Frize,” 2019.
- Ocula Magazine, op. cit.
