Several years ago, I came across a rather blunt exhortation in a Finnish magazine: “Hey, all you abstract painters. What you’re doing isn’t interesting. So just stop!” These words have been ringing in my ears ever since, and most of the time they seem pretty judicious. But occasionally something turns up that makes me think twice like Bernard Frize’s recent “herringbone” paintings. What intrigues me isn’t so much Frize’s detached, industrial approach or his attempt to reduce “creation” to chance and mechanics, but rather the transparency of his method: Once one gets the process, one also