An entire canon of artists appear in various guises throughout Monique Frydman’s exhibition. In some of the French artist’s paintings, you can see the shimmering light of the Impressionist Pierre Bonnard; in others, the diaphanous squares of Mark Rothko; in others still, the splashy airiness of Helen Frankenthaler, the monochrome deadpan of Robert Ryman and so on, and so on. With Frydman, you get the sense of someone assessing the merits of these past masters, harvesting their DNA and weaving it into her delicate, shimmering brand of abstraction.
Some of this referencing is subtle. Some is less so. The sickly, greenish-yellow hues of ‘L’Absinthe’ might nod to the eponymous drink, but in scale and iridescence this painting bears more than a passing resemblance to Monet’s monumental ‘Water Lilies’ series. The second is the vast, freestanding ‘Polyptyque Sassetta’, which is essentially an abstract, secular medieval altarpiece. Seeing the blue of the Virgin Mary’s robe and the gold of angelic halos appear in ghostly, deconstructed terms is certainly very dazzling. But it’s hard not to wonder: to what end?
Frydman clearly has many a Post-it stuck in her art history books. But the work still has to stand on its own two feet. Her chief aesthetic tools are frottage (a technique involving rubbing pastels and pigments on unstretched canvas) and repeated deployment of curling arabesques. These can lead to wonderful, dizzying effects on the eye, where shapes and forms flicker like after-images. On the other hand, just as many pictures come off as niceties: ordered, formalistic and risk-averse. It’s not essential to know your painting history in order to enjoy this show. The fact that it undoubtedly helps says a lot about Frydman’s beguiling, cerebral but ultimately indebted art.
@MattBreen3