In this paper, we consider a novel scheme referred to as Cartesian contour to concisely represent the collection of frequent itemsets. Different from the existing works, this scheme provides a complete view of these itemsets by covering the entire collection of them. More interestingly, it takes a first step in deriving a generative view of the frequent pattern formulation, i.e., how a small number of patterns interact with each other and produce the complexity of frequent itemsets. We perform a theoretical investigation of the concise representation problem and link it to the biclique set cover problem and prove its NP-hardness. We develop a novel approach utilizing the technique developed in frequent itemset mining, set cover, and max k-cover to approximate the minimal biclique set cover problem. In addition, we consider several heuristic techniques to speedup the construction of Cartesian contour. The detailed experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.