FLOATING SIGNIFIERS:
Recent work of Tom de Freston, exhibited at Stratford Gallery in May and JuneAndrew Stibbs

Shown in Artspace 2008

Where is the borderline between abstract and figurative? In the artist’s intention or the viewer’s perception? Or can the distinction be made in terms of objective features of the finished work?

The questions are raised by Tom de Freston’s 2D work from the last nine months, a generous selection of over a hundred of which were exhibited in May and June at Stratford Gallery, where he was Artist in Residence. They were in roughly chronological sequence, with a score or so of big paintings interspersed by smaller framed preliminary sketches and free-standing sequences. Tom says he has recently moved into figurative from abstract paintings, but the signs of his concerns as an abstract artist survive and in many ways give a special power to his representations.

As in abstracts, there is a special and central attention to the nature and effect of the surface of the paper or canvas he works on, not only in the colours (largely the unpretty colours of blood, earth and storm- or night-black skies) but also in the texture and mark-making methods. The exhibition described his pieces as ‘mixed media’, but that applies less to the paint – almost always acrylic – as to what lies under and over it. The paper may be newsprint or pages of an atlas, or it may have been crumpled before he uses it; the large canvases may be gridded, stained or roughly plastered with paint, and the finished painting varnished in different striking ways, as with some which are partly or wholly coated in diamond-hard glittering yacht varnish.

Figures are identifiable in his images, it is never clear who or where they are or what they are doing. Some of the earlier ones, like Danae from Titian, are recognisably from other painters who have influenced him, and there is a powerful painting incorporating a skull-headed Drummer Boy from Daumier where the fiercely distressed abstract background is strongly suggestive of a battlefield aftermath. More recent figures have broken loose from classical references and spring from more ephemeral and popular representations, as in news photos of sports players. These images take their power (and successfully avoid the associated danger of mere vagueness) from their uncertainty. Many, all faceless, seem to be falling or jumping or floating for reasons which are not clear but clearly urgent and not recreational. There are unsettling groupings and juxtapositions as in the ‘The Lady and Him’ paintings. Like some universal portmanteau symbols or archetypes, they provoke an unidentified portentousness or unease, evoking emotions from the unconscious. They are signifiers with multiple or indecipherable signifieds.

Tom says some of these recurrent images emerge inexplicably as he works, inviting rationalisation only after they have insisted on their presence, such as the horse which features in one group of paintings and drawings. He quotes Gerhard Richter to the effect that the deed comes before the idea.

As Artist in Residence at the Stratford Gallery he was working on images of fallen (rather than falling) figures (to see how he obtained his initial images read the blog he shares on www.whalecrow.co.uk), but the most recent finished work in the exhibition was of the ‘floaters’. The figure in the large painting ‘Floater of Lethe’ is quite literally a floating signifier. As it is hung, the figure seems to move from one element into another (a recurrent feature of his work, including the horse pictures). This one moves against the direction of the Westerner’s eye-scan from the right hand side’s delicately pale stained grid which could be pool tiles, to a darker, more chaotic left.

A grid often partially underlies his images (hence the use of map papers?) and, its contrast with the fluidity of the loosely painted figures strengthens a sense of escape or entrapment. But in the case of the ‘Floater of Lethe’ perhaps one should say the escape is only partial and the left hand side looks pretty viscous and almost embedding the figure. One outstretched arm has a suggestion of wing feather trailing from it (elsewhere he has a wingless falling Icarus). Although in some of the associated sketches the figure is floating above its own shadow on what looks like the bottom of a pool, in the big picture there are possibilities that the figure is really falling, reclining, or rising up, possibilities that become successively prominent as you imagine the canvas rotated.

With its ambiguities and hints of myth, and its insistence on its abstract design and engaging textures, this picture, which was used on the exhibition’s promotional postcard, is an epitome of Tom de Freston’s engaging and disturbing work.

Andrew Stibbs