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Bernard Frieze-Colour Divides

The Simon Lee Gallery

May 2014

London, United Kingdom

You can see the base colours in some works which can be rich and graphic. They break through when you get up close but turn into whispers when you stand back. He manages to mix what look like man made marks with what seems like natures imprint. It is his technique of painting in several colours applied to one large brush that create these effects. The colours are industrial but the design seems to be taken from the natural world. But if you look at them for long enough these positions can switch.

These works are all the same but so very different. Bernard Frieze uses an incredible mixture of control and chance allowing his paint to bleed and smear but because it is repeated so many times he makes you feel like he has tammed chaos just long enough to capture it briefly.They are hypnotic but comforting like a view of nature. You feel you are looking deep into something organic where an order underlies everything. We cant see that deep with our eyes but we can sense it, a sense of life at its most basic form, just repetition and chance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He calls his designs, paths or conversations of the human brain. They are familiar but ambigious and I beleive it is this combination in art that often stimulates are thoughts the most. In a way he seems to have created works that are a representation of that stimulation.

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