Hong Kong is getting a bit cooler now, but the sheer number of cultural events in the city keep everything pretty hot. In the last few weeks alone we’ve seen quite a handful of great offerings. Adrian Wong just launched a full show in Saamlung, for example, which we think is great. The fall auctions for Para/Site and the Asia Art Archives did pretty well in the past weeks. This weekend alone Hong Kongers had a chance to see some independent music on multiple stages at the Clockenflap Music Festival and see some independent design at DETOUR 2012. Next week international starchitects will be in the city to chat at BODW (Business of Design Week). Again, what cultural dessert?
To water the once dry dessert, Hong Kong’s outposts of foreign galleries have done quite well staging solo shows for artists abroad, something normal in every major city but new for us. White Cube cross cultivates by showing western artists here and eastern artists in the UK. Ben Brown Fine Arts in Hong Kong is exhibiting really great regional work so far. And last week we were able to meet acclaimed French painter, Bernard Frize, at Simon Lee Gallery, his first show in Asia. We had a chance to chat briefly, and pretty much mutually agreed that what Simon Lee and other galleries have been doing is giving a great platform for major artists to showcase their works for a new audience. Of course it benefits the artists to exhibit for emerging art markets especially in Asia, but also the presence of works here can only enhance the education for new artists in the city. To create new and better work, we have to learn from the masters. Bernard Frize is of course one of them.
In person, Frize is nice, friendly, and a bit media-shy, but for the first day of the show he was in good spirits. In person you wouldn’t believe Frize has had a successful 40-year career behind him. His works are defined by their formal abstract compositions in primary and secondary colors and its relationship to the white spaces in between. Frize usually works with Acrylic but recently he’s reunited with oil owing the move to enhance “the optical effect of the combinations of colour”, adding that this technique allows for, “the spatial effect of depth, (creating) the illusion of the differential reflection of light,”
The French born Frize splits his time between Paris and Berlin with works recently exhibited at the 2012 Bienal of Sao Paulo. His work is represented in public collections at The Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MOCA in Los Angeles, and the Museum fur Moderne Kunst. Most notably the paintings are all uniquely different, yet when you see a whole catalogue of works, everything is undeniably Frize. His method is all about the process and that one work is a continuation of the one before it, and will inform the one after. The ideas amongst works blend and evolve, with each new composition a preview of potential directions. Pieces now can easily be juxtaposed with any series many years before, and unlike other artists who work thematically, Frize’s work reads fresh, ie non-self-derivative… and ultimately devoid of time and context. We sit with the artist to ask him a few questions below. If you have time, check out a snippet of Frize at Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong. It will be on exhibit until mid-January.
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theWanderlister+: Bernard, tell us about the importance of “process” in the work of an artist. And is it something that all artists young and old should prescribe to?
Bernard Frize: If a painting could exist in the snap of a finger, it would be very frustrating. I enjoy not only the process of making but the mental process which leads to making the painting. Sure, it is dirty, takes time, often nerve wracking, but at the end of the day when you see a little light, it looks very rewarding. The physical work feeds the mental work. Ideas have to find their “body” otherwise they don’t exist.
theW+: I find that your work belongs in its own space and time, and therefore not of this world. Process can potentially make it read “linear” if you want it to, but as the exhibition in Simon Lee HK shows… with the juxtaposition of new and older works, this is not the case.
BF: The most recent painting is a panorama in a single canvas. It is something of chaos, explosion in contrast to the 3 older paintings in front which are based on a system.
B.Frize, Plontols, 2012 / Oil on Canvas / 180x360cm
I hope that putting them together in the same space might make you think about what could be the organizing principal of this new painting.
B.Frize, Insulaire i,j,p, 2004 / Oil on Canvas / 150 x 132 cm each
But in fact, you find rules don’t apply. It is something like daily life - where we learn patterns and understand parts of the world, and then on the other hand we find surprises.
theW+: Your works are parts of a whole, like an atom belongs to a whole mass… an idea within an idea within an idea. What is the big “picture” in the work that you do? What do you aim to achieve?
BF: Often, there are no words to express it, sometimes I don’t even know why I painted a painting, and I am surprised. It is long afterwards that I can put words to it. Paintings are marks which indicate where, how, and who I am and which overall give evidence to my desires to meet them in person.
B.Frize, Phocion series, 2009 / Acrylic and resin on Canvas / 81 x 66cm
theW+: Your work is beautiful and with colors compositionally balanced to perfection. Is your aim to achieve beauty? Is this important?
BF: In real life, discriminating with colours is horrible, but, in painting it is the starting and functional point. Sometimes, it is necessary to adjust the number of colours to a topological situation. Most of the time, I avoid choosing colours. I use as many as I can and you see a multicoloured painting where none of the hues makes its own partition. I am not responsible for your taste, and colour is only one element among many through which to approach a painting.
theW+: Is every piece and composition an “end” in its own right? Or do you think you will eventually get to the “end”? Are you aiming for the complete picture?
BF: Does a work created in parts have a sense of “self”? With this in view, the different paintings of my work should be orientated towards a goal and should gradually reconstitute the magma of their origins. My failed paintings are as important as the successful ones; they open and close the same pathways. The work takes root in different magmas which evolve with passing time like my understanding of myself, of society, culture etc., which amounts to saying that, by representing the world around me, I am constructing the meaning I attribute to myself and the one I pass on to my work. This representation achieves a truth that is inexhaustible yet temporarily satisfied, with each successive painting. Maybe it is emptying a bottle?
SEE Bernard Frize: Fat Paintings at SIMON LEE Hong Kong @ 304 Pedder Building on 12 Pedder Street, Central. Now to January 15, 2013
JJ.
