Pair A

Painted in 1995, Bernard Frize’s Pair A is a tapestry of chromatic vibrancy. Interlocking forms of crimson and mauve converge and confront squares of navy, green and cerulean. In the upper corner, a flash of yellow gives way to ribbons of red and swathes of green. Characteristic of the paintings of this period, the flat surface of Pair A looks terrestrial – an expanse of land seen from above – yet Frize vehemently denies any subjective reading of his work. Instead, his practice is decidedly process-oriented and not concerned with reaching a visual conclusion. Frize’s concerns about the role of painting arose during the widespread May 1968 protests in France, and against this backdrop of civil unrest, he questioned the responsibility of the artist. Determining that the purpose of painting was simply to represent the relationship between the world, the viewer and the flat surface, he generates specific rules for each series of work in order to restrict how his materials are applied. If a painting satisfactorily emerges from these restrictions, then Frize keeps it; if not, it is jettisoned. Forming a proposition, his works are fundamentally unresolvable, governed entirely by the materials themselves. As curator Jean-Pierre Criqui observed, ‘The painting, then, is a consequence, a record rather than a goal the artist decided to achieve; it is the image of its own execution’ (J. Criqui, ‘Bernard Frize: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris’, Artforum, November 2003, p. 183). This year, Frize was the subject of a major retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.