With a career which spans more than 40 years, Bernard Frize is widely recognised as one of the most important and influential painters of his time. The breadth of the formal and conceptual vocabulary he has developed, encompassing elements of process, of seriality, of colour and of the passage of time has made the influence of his work on painters of his own and later generations unsurpassed. Frize’s abstract compositions are the systematic products of carefully constructed sets of rules, sometimes elaborate, sometimes simple; choreographed performances which determine the works’ formal compositions.

This idea of fragments of a whole has a particular resonance when considering the disjunction between Frize’s studio practice and the structure of display of his work. While the bodies of work he develops in series are often worked through in the studio in their entirety in the way he describes here, when he shows the works, he will often place works from different series together, pulling them out from the company of their siblings and highlighting resonances between paintings which result from quite different systems of making.

The result is to underline the artist’s own assertion that all his paintings are in a certain sense, one and the same, each the result of the application of this systematic approach. The rules may be different, but the project is the same.

Taken out of the context of the complete series each painting acts as a microcosm of the whole, carrying within it all the associations and resonances of the system and method of the series. It is for this reason that the dialogues between the works from different series Frize presents are so vibrant. Here, Plontois, a 3.6 metre frieze-like painting from 2012 is juxtaposed with the Insulaire works. It too uses a modelled gradation of paint within each band of colour to suggest volume, a formal device which gave its name to the 2007 exhibition of the Insulaire sequence at Kunsthalle Brandts: “Bernard Frize FAT Paintings”. In this new work, though, the riotous swirling ebullience of colour seems to rupture any logical ordering in the picture plane, creating a tension between the system of the Insulaire paintings and the freedom of the new work.