Dirimart is pleased to host Bernard Frize’s first solo exhibition in Istanbul comprised of new works for this show. Since the late 1970s, Frize has been investigating on the materiality of the medium to further develop his method. Free of personal expression, any trace of subjectivity, he keeps generating predetermined geometrical motifs or patterns. “Feelings and emotions do not belong here,” says the artist. What matters for him is the act of painting; he establishes simple rules that he applies to certain colors within a frame of painting actions. “Nothing is described. No composition. The structure is like the surface. No referent apart, perhaps, from being classifiable as painting, and no auto-reference.” A discontinuous grid, almost a texture.
Bernard Frize occupies a unique position in abstract painting, due to austerity of his artistic ideas paired with a freedom of implementation. He loves paradoxes. “In order to chance to work, you have to create conditions that make chance possible, one of which is having a lot of time. It is a rather complex thing to arrange situations in which you do nothing and things happen by themselves,” he says. Color is another paradox for it does “not particularly interest” him, despite its being a vital raw material for his work. By using color in a nonhierarchical, experimental, technical-mechanical manner, Frize lends his works a certain dynamic through contradictions. Concentrating on the process of production of the painting rather than the elements like color, composition, and symbols offers a nice challenge to the viewer: the challenge of seeing/hearing the “pictorial score.”
