In a black-snot city it can be hard to get your fix of rainbow hues. So if you’re feeling the impact of a grey-on-grey commute a little too strongly, you could do a whole lot worse than spending half an hour with the art of Bernard Frize.
Currently on display at Simon Lee, the French artist’s works are mainly lush, large-scale abstract paintings made up of millions of colourful streaks. Ok, he does a few other things too – little geometric-y images and, shhh, even a few in grey (think of it as silver, it sounds classier and more uplifting). The undoubted focus of this show, however, is these oddly transfixing line-on-line, block-on-block colour works.
The reason they’re worth making a trip to see is because this is exactly the sort of art that reproduces badly. A Google search will give you a basic idea, but it isn’t until you’re standing in front of them that they stop looking like something vaguely pleasing to have on the bathroom wall and start looking like psychotropic mindfucks.
In each of the images you can still see the gridlines divvying up the canvas, like neatly ruled pencil marks in a school maths book. These regimented guides feel like a bit of a deliberate joke, because nothing stays inside the lines here. At every point of contact, the colours bleed into each other like melting candles or blobs of ink in water.
The other ‘you need to see it to believe it’ point is that the colours themselves change the more you look at them. At first glance you register My Little Pony shades of pastel pink, maybe some mauviness, but stare for a while and seaside turquoise, royal blues and burning hits of blood red appear instead. A perfect visual sugar rush.