Peter Frie. Path

About

Certainly Frie's animated brushwork captures all the drama and movement of scudding clouds across the sky and of trees rustling in the wind, and he conveys all the emotional impact of the different seasons or a sudden change in the weather. Frie's landscapes, however, are not straightforwardly representational. He does not depict particular places, but instead invents a fusion of different scenes he has witnessed at various times and in various places, which he later recollects in his studio. Frie enhances this idea that we are looking at the representation of memory, by often leaving unpainted portions of canvas around his landscapes. The scene he has painted therefore hovers in a kind of limbo somewhere between the real and unreal, just like the sudden flash of remembrance. It is this rendering of 'inner' or psychological space which makes Frie's work so captivating and contemporary.

Frie has recently been spending more and more time away from his native Sweden on Phuket. His sojourn in Thailand allies him with artists of the past who also went to foreign countries. Unlike Gaugin or Matisse, however, Frie is not looking for exotic subject matter; no palm trees or monkeys appear in his latest work and instead he continues to paint what he has always painted. However, he has admitted a change to his palette and a new deep red has begun to appear in his work, the kind of vivid colour we experience "more clearly and more intensely closer to the Equator, in the brief moments before the golden orb of the sun dips below the horizon." Another new departure is sculpture and Frie has begun to make dark-patinated bronzes, which are three-dimensional versions of the kinds of trees which appear in his paintings. These are "recognisably a painter's sculptures, given they are shaped as much by light and shade as by the hand... they create their own surrounding world and scale. When we look at them, we can see the air vibrating around them." (Timo Valjakka, Under the Red Sky, 2016)