“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”
Death is a central tenant of tragedy and one that is littered through Shakespeare’s tragedies. He achieves pathos through language, characterisation and plot development.
For a painter different tools are required to articulate death. Certain intrinsic qualities of painting lend themselves to death as a subject. Death brings stillness and silence, both inherent to painting.

The use of space serves a key function. Consider images of the deposition, particularly those of Rubens and Rembrandt. The body of Christ is lowered across the central point of a vertical rectangle. The semantics of the space point to the weight of flesh descending from the cross to the ground. This is the positioning of a form within the spatial coordinates of a rectangular picture plane to describe a particular narrative.

Robert Capa’s iconic ‘Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death’ 1936 uses space both as a narrative and a poetic device. The falling soldier only occupies the left hand half of the horizontal rectangle. The right hand half is an empty landscape and sky. The relationship between the figure and the space speaks of a narrative, of an opposing militant out of shot who has fired the bullet. It also opens up a dialogue between active and empty space, with the empty space speaking of the silence and emptiness which follows the soldiers fall.

David’s ‘Death of Marat’ 1793 deploys space in a similar fashion, but almost entirely free of the narrative function of space in the image by Capa and those paintings of the ‘Deposition’. Marat lies dead in the bath, his pose a domestic and modern shadow of depictions of the dead Christ (think Michelangelo’s Pieta, in particular with the elongated arm hanging over the bath or Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ) . David stages the scene in a dramatic and inventive way. The figure and relevant props only occupy the bottom half of the painting. The top half is empty, bar a play of light across the dark surface. The empty space serves no narrative function, everything we need to read the picture is present in the bottom half. The lack of direct function or necessity is what serves to allow the space to take on an entirely poetic role.
Baudelaire’s commentary on David’s ‘Marat’ has often been dismissed as Romanticised poetic ramblings typical of his peculiar type of French criticism.
“There is, in this work, something at once tender and poignant; in the cold air of this room, on these cold walls, around this cold and funereal bathtub, a soul flutters….”
Fanciful claims of a paintings ability to invoke the unseen? Yet it seems that the works very pathos is based around the role space has in creating at least a sense of the spiritual, of that beyond the flesh.
Between the bottom half and top half a binary opposition is set up, active vs passive, full vs empty, flesh vs spirit. The bottom half is occupied by the tomb like bath, a Carravaggesque body, all heavy tones and idealised flesh and form. The top half is a proto Rothko surface, the scumbling setting up vibrations of light and dark across the surface. We read the space as empty, yet it seems to throb and vibrate as if active, as if filled with some presence. The semantics of the space make a reading such as Baudelaire’s both natural and logical. It creates a profound and moving account of death, of the corporeal fleshy matter of the body and the spiritual, ethereal essence which leaves us at death.
Cordat killed Marat as she felt he was responsible for the September Massacres and was petrified at his role in what seemed like an inevitable decent to all out civil war. She claimed ‘I killed one man to save 100,000”. Yet through his use of space David was able to make a Martyr of Marat and turn Cordat’s Villain into the iconic hero of the revolution.

I’m currently working my way through Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, for anyone who has read it, they’ll know what I mean when I say ‘working through’,  you read more with your stomach than your mind.  Placing a different emphasis on the idea of digesting what was written.  What has really struck me about the novel is the tapestry of images that are conjured in the distressed, dislocated prose.  More-to-the-point, the directness of the images, they seem to hit you straight into your cerebral cortex and attach there for permanent harvest.  So over the coming weeks, don’t be surprised if I recite some more extracts from this dirty fuzz-ball.

And first off:

“That old stove climbing up my back”  What a line!

According to Burroughs this is a saying that originates from the British Isles, relating to users of a particular pick up, whereby the individual (particularly common in Edinburgh) bubbles coal gas through Klim, which is a type of horrible powdered milk.  The saying relates specifically to when the addict is sick from needing a fix.  Whether this is true, or made up by Burroughs I don’t think really matters.

Next

“showing the Nordic Skull beneath with double exposure” again fantastic imagery.

“A copraphage calls for a plate, shits on it and eats the shit, exclaiming ‘mmmm, thats my rich substance.’”

I wonder if he read Marquis de Sade….

An installation of painting video and performance, which are all indebted to interests in similar theme’s; ritual, base desire and a curiosity of whether somthing that is based in illusion can ever be real.

Corpus was an extesnive and existing group show produced by HRL Contemporary. Tom de Freston was one of two painters to occupy the central space, as well as occupying three other subsiduary rooms in the old chapel. The show brought together an extensive range of figurative art, all housed in ‘The Old Chapel- St. Johns Wood’, a sprawling piece of architecture with multiple layers of history.

As stressed students hurry among the centenary walls of Christ’s College in Cambridge and the bell of the old chapel announces Evensong, a half-metre-long painting awaits completion by the hands of a young artist in his studio. Tom de Freston, the holder of the 08/09 Levy Plumb Visual Arts Residency, grasps a tin of bright pink acrylic and spreads the diluted paint onto the canvas, staining figures throughout his work in a way that is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s dynamic gestures.

From amongst the bright colours and energetic traces of paint, bold characters stare out at the observer. They are daringly dressed, or perhaps more accurately, undressed, since most of the figures wear only bright red underwear and socks, and sport immaculate white masks. Indeed, in Tom’s treatment of the image of man, he appears to make man the object of an absurd tragedy.

Apart from wanting to capture the viewer’s attention, Tom also attempts to create a recurrent character in his work that inspires feelings of solemnity, pity and absurdity, all at the same time. If one asks him; ‘Tom, is this supposed to be tragic? Or are you just mocking us? ’ he answers, ‘Both; they are tragic comic’.

In an interview with Professor Admiral Face, Tom defines tragedy in painting as ‘the play between the construction of an implied ideal and the realisation of its falseness’. When he admires art’s historical characters, such as David’s Napoleon, he says he is actually smiling at their potential to become ridiculous. He proceeds to paint them naked, sometimes in erotic positions, confronting their own solemnity and ridicule in a context where glory appears as the epitome of the grotesque. Clothing his characters in radioactive pink boxers and red socks is a very straight, bold and comical way to transform them into the antithesis of themselves. They become pathetic characters, more suited to making the viewer revel in their ludicrousness, than to impressing them.

‘That’s just what I want. I wanted the clothes, paradoxically, to strip the characters of their desire for heroism,’ he says.

From heroism Tom de Freston shifts to tragedy; a kind of tragedy that inspires laughter with its foolishness. Indeed, can his imagery actually be called tragedy? Does it not belong to the field of comedy? ‘Certainly not’ he asserts. ‘It’s more a search for a quiet caustic wit. Let’s call it Melancomic’.

The body of his work, much of which was shown at the exhibition at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Entitled ‘Reflections’ in September 2009 , is all about drama; how to materialize it, how to mock it, how to exaggerate it to the point where it loses its inner sense of sadness. As he explains, internalised sadness is an element at the centre of his work, THE heart from which every kind of bold image describing HIS vision of the human being finds its roots.

Hundreds of drawings and studies show Tom’s analysis of the expressionism of the human figure. In his earlier works, such drama was depicted using the image of the fall; romantic, fragile, floating, and hypnotizing figures such as depicted in his studies anticipating the paintings ‘Icarus’ and ‘Deposition II’. However, Tom’s figuration of man has since developed from this image towards the idea of de-dramatization, as represented in his narrative painting, ‘A Brief History of Heroism’. The latter resembles a theatrical scene, where each actor performs his own role in a composition of pre-conceived chaos.

Tom feels that his work is related to the forms and powers of theatrical drama. ‘The poetry of paint resides in its ability to be mimetic, expressive, self-referential and spiritual’. He reflects upon characters by situating them in the ‘theatre of their performance’. Thus, like comedians behind white masks on a theatre stage, they perform the everyday tragedy of a story characterized by nonsense and cynicism. It is, he declares, a way ‘to provide a fleeting escape from tangible reality’.

Having studied History of Art as an undergraduate at Cambridge University, the references to the great Masters’ pieces are constantly present in his paintings. It is possible to find many art historical references in Tom’s work, especially in his piece, ‘History Painting’. From Manet’s ‘Olympia’ to David’s ‘La Mort de Marat’, the background is full of these depictions mixed with characters coming straight from the artist’s everyday life and incongruously dressed in highly stylized red or electric pink underwear. He is, he states, ‘devouring these past images and excreting and regurgitating them back out onto the canvas’.

This is not cannibalism, he insists, but a way to make these historical images his own. His personal style comes from ‘the manner in which I deal with the source and the way in which I rip specific elements from their historical context and then piece them back together in new orders and systems’.

Aware of the impact on the public of such iconic images, he ‘dares’ to use them in order to manifest the absurdity of what is considered one of the most serious of fields - history. He hopes it offers a broader scope to the reading of human history in general. He cites, mocks, and plays not only with art historical images but also with the titles of the works. Indeed, at the time of thinking of a title for one of his painting, Tom smiles and starts making puns, enjoying some comical nonsense. Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ becomes ‘The Last of the Seducer’ and even ‘The Raft of the Reducer’.

Tom de Freston’s studies in art history also lead him to a second essential standpoint in his work: the treatment of space. From the Renaissance to contemporary Figuration, its place in art has changed. Aware of this, he plays with both the antagonism of the space and its sense of unsteadiness in works where there is a sense of perspective but it is nevertheless possible to perceive the flatness of the wall.

‘It is about creating a certain kind of tension which I don’t yet think that I have achieved. The structure and the figures are often laid over the surface in a manner which still allows large parts of the original layer to show through. The same skin of paint can be seen in areas of foreground, background or a section of a figure’.

The boldness of Tom’s images, the colours used, his relationship with the past as well as the dialogue between the different spaces is the result of a process of investigation and experimentation that has taken place over the year in his bright and wild studio at Cambridge. He not only analysed subjects through drawings and studies, but also through photographs and by experimenting with different supports and materials such as charcoal, acrylic, human hair, paint mediums and glue. There are hundreds of images in these sketches, with only few present on some of the finished paintings. Combined, they convey an unorthodox mix of feelings, including instability, pity and humour.

In a critique entitled, ‘engaging with Tom de Freston’s boxer shorts’ Published in the catalogue for the exhibition ‘REFLECTIONS’, Dr. Damien Freeman of Magdalene College Cambridge, states that the challenges of spirituality and aesthetics offer ‘a basis for moral growth’ and can be considered by the viewer as a guiding framework. The viewer can look at the artwork and then let himself be scandalized by the bold sexual aspect of its figures. He might also smile and think: ‘What if this was actually the common pathos of our human condition?’

From Anthony Gormley to Marlene Dumas, Matthew Barney to Marc Quinn, representations of the human figure can be found throughout contemporary art. Alternatively understood as an embodiment of the artist, a mirror of the viewer, or a means of exploring identity, the body remains a potent site of aesthetic investigation. It is this word ‘investigation’ that is crucial, for the bodies we find throughout this exhibition seem to lack coherence, stability, and unity. In contrast, they appear as sites of endless exploration: uneven terrains meant to be picked apart, unpacked, fragmented, dispersed, and shattered. And as the artists investigate the body, we, as viewers, investigate their art. Seeking not to arrive at a fixed conclusion, but seeking to understand these aesthetic processes of dispersion; discovering meaning not in the glue that pieces these bodily fragments together but in the fissions and the cracks that tear them apart.

Benjamin Cohen and Tom de Freston, the two artists on whom I will focus tonight, insert these ideas of the fragmented, multiplied and dispersed body within a traditional format of painting. In this way, these two artists can be said to impart a thoroughly ‘contemporary’ sensibility through a classical language of technique and form. This ‘schizophrenic’ approach, to borrow the language of Deleuze and Guattari, is also reflected in their paintings’ content, which juxtaposes iconic religious imagery with the banal and the mundane. While the work of these two artists can be discussed in relation to one another, my focus will be on the differences between their paintings and the uniqueness of their artistic visions. Perhaps as a reflection of the bodies themselves, my intention is not to present a ‘singular’ or ‘absolute’ reading of this work, but rather to suggest a series of propositions, potential approaches and contextualizations. Interpretations that I hope might stimulate later discussions and serve as a catalyst for further insights.

The first artist I will discuss is Tom de Freston. Holding a Masters degree in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge, Freston remains actively involved in the university’s teaching and research departments. This ongoing engagement with and knowledge of Art History is reflected in his paintings, which are often saturated with iconic art historical images from Titian to Géricault and Manet. One example of this style of reference is his 2009 painting A Brief History of Heroism. While the male figures clad in red shorts, socks and white masks dominate the canvas, closer inspection reveals a number of iconic female forms as well. In the center of the painting, on the lower panel of pale pink that stretches across its entire breadth, we find a line drawing replica of Manet’s famous painting Olympia, which shocked the French bourgeoisie upon its 1863 unveiling due to its depiction of green-tinged ‘cadaverous’ flesh and aggressive feminine gaze. Contrasting this image of the sickly or debased woman is the line drawing on the far left of the canvas’s lower panel, which replicates Titian’s resplendent Venus of Urbino painting from 1538, currently hanging at London’s National Gallery. In a published interview from 2009, Freston suggests that his artistic license derives in part from this ‘cannibalization’ of art historical forms; in his words, “I like the image of me literally devouring these past images and excreting and regurgitating them back out onto the canvas. I think the mass of the quotations and the context in which they sit makes it clear that this is something different to mere plagiarism. […] Through the sheer mass of references, almost all of which are canonical and weighty, I am looking to pick away at the very fabric of the structure and system in which these images have been housed.”

With this extensive multiplication of references, Freston flattens a linear art historical timeline within a single pictorial plane. The original context of the forms he quotes is forgotten, rendered virtually meaningless. Different historical periods and artistic styles are treated in the same manner and compressed into a single frame. This style of art historical quotation, executed in an almost hysterical palette of vibrant colors and overlapping forms, bears a sharp resemblance to certain works by German artists in the 1980s. Building upon the foundation laid by an earlier generation of artists such as Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and above all Joseph Beuys, 1980s Germany saw an explosion of creativity centered on the reanimation of painting. As the critic Wolfgang Max Faust wrote in 1982: “What’s new, in relation to the ‘60s and ‘70s, is that an entire generation of artists is turning to painting. The result is that recent developments are being reinterpreted: Through the young generation’s massive rediscovery of painting, painters who were already around in the previous decade are being seen in a new context.” Movements like the Neue Wilde – the use of rapid, expressive gesture and intense color exemplified by the artists Martin Kippenberger and Walter Dahn – as well as Neo-Surrealists like Salvo and Milan Kunc all seem to influence Freston’s vibrant, emotive and theatrical art. His interest in the medium of painting itself as both tool and content – he writes in his artist’s statement that “paint as a linguistic tool […] is the central and continuing theme of the paintings” – could easily be explored in relation to this previous generation’s rediscovery of and fascination with painting and its history.

The work of these German painters, and in particular the Neo-Surrealists, also bears a distinct resemblance to Freston’s use of architectural space. The human figures in his paintings are set against geometrical ‘stages’ composed of platforms, grids, claustrophobic rooms, and partitioned background sets. The spaces that result appear illusory and dream-like, much like the otherworldly landscapes of Giorgio di Chirico. In the way that his paintings destabilize a linear art history – the almost hallucinogenic juxtaposition of past images stripping them of fixed or understandable chronology – Freston’s canvases also destabilize traditional perspective and three-dimensional geometric space. This ‘unreality’ of space is further augmented by the impression of weightlessness and an absence of gravity. In A Lover’s Discourse (the three panels horizontally aligned) and A Lover’s Discourse II (the two panels vertically aligned), the solitary figures appear to float as though in a outer-space vacuum chamber. Named for Roland Barthes’ book of textual ‘fragments’ that describe the inescapable loneliness of a lover who can never truly see the one they love, Freston’s bodies are similarly fragmented and apart. Other ‘weightless’ figures, which further emphasize the ‘unreality’ of Freston’s architectural spaces, include his Desire for the fall paintings, his Floater canvas, and the two paintings entitled The Boy Whose Head Came Off, in which the body, like space, cannot be held together.

But how does this particular de-realization of architectural space fit together with the previously discussed abundance of art historical references? What is the relationship between these stylistic or ‘painterly’ qualities and a subject matter that is often overwhelming sadistic? From bestiality to rape to mutilation, how do we reconcile these disturbing images with the almost childlike frivolity and pathetic humour in which they come wrapped? What do we make of the reoccurring appearance of the ‘anti-hero’ clad solely in boxers and red socks? How should we, as viewers, approach or make sense of this work? I have focused my discussion thus far on the formal and stylistic qualities of Freston’s painting because – for me – they are fundamental to my understanding of his subject matter. To put it most simply, Freston presents us with the painting as ‘theatre’ – as stage. As theatregoers enter a willed suspension of disbelief, I find myself approaching his paintings as spaces of exception in which centuries seem to pass in a single moment (art historical referencing) and vast landscapes coalesce within a single black box (his de-realization of space). Entering Freston’s theatre, we discover the star himself – a role-playing figure in red socks, a Pasolini of painters – who beckons us inside his fairground of fantasy and myth. In the painting Fast Judgment he poses at the bottom left of the canvas with arms stretched wide, waving us through as though he was a circus ringmaster, giving us the right of entry to explore this alternate world of horror shows, cosmic tours, and judgment days.

The work of the second artist I will discuss, Benjamin Cohen, is substantially different. While he also focuses on the male figure, whose nudity is rendered somehow humorous by the limited elements of clothing that remain (in Cohen’s work the glasses, in Freston’s work, the red boxers and socks), Cohen’s focus appears to be more on the figure itself rather than the context in which that figure is placed. The one exception to this statement is his painting Girish 1 from 2008. A naked figure sits hunched on a wooden stool, hands folded together in his lap. Head tilted slightly to the left and with a grimace on his face, he peers straight ahead, to a space outside the painting’s frame. We, as viewers, are presented with his profile, a dark shadow on his cheeks indicating day-old stubble and his body lit from a light-filled window situated in the background. Evocative of a life-drawing class or a painting’s studio, the painting captures the boredom and annoyance of the male model while also illustrating the development of Cohen’s artistic style.

This style is more clearly realized in his later work from 2009, in particular, the painting Girish II (seen on the Corpus exhibition poster) and the diptych painting Oumar. Both of these paintings present the central figure (or figures) against flat areas of seductive colour that seem impersonally applied. The bright, pleasing palette of these works – which sharply contrast with Freston’s almost sickening terrain of vomit-like pinks and over-saturation – undercut the potentially disturbing elements of the bodies themselves. In Girish II, the figure thrusts his chest forward and holds his hands open at his sides in a gesture of martyrdom or supplication – an impression that is also evoked by the patches of blood red in his palms and trailing down his legs. While chest, hands, and stomach are clearly defined, the head and legs evaporate into streams of paint, as if he is either being devoured by or breaking through the flat plane of the canvas. This feeling that the human figures are either intruding into or perhaps being covered by the wall of gently coloured paint is also present in the diptych Oumar. The three overweight and fragmentary female forms contrast with the wash of green and white that obscures the figures’ heads and legs, as though Jenny Saville’s tumescent female forms were thrust into a Gary Hume painting. It is this juxtaposition in Cohen’s work that fascinates me: the play between the physical beauty of his paintings and their disturbing undercurrents of body dysmorphia and physical shame. This juxtaposition deserves further elaboration, particularly in the context of his other work’s focus on faces that are similarly obscured by dashes of paint. I look forward to the artists’ responses and hope that some of the ideas I have presented will stimulate further discussion. Many thanks for your time and many thanks to Tom and Benjamin for giving us such wonderful work to discuss.

From 2-3am on the 24th of June Tom de Freston took part in the One and Other Fourth Plinth project. Dressed in boxers, socks and a paper crown, he arrived armed with a wooden sword, water pistol and a megaphone. He interviewed his alter ego for the Varsity newspaper…(full interview)

Housed in a gallery on a train station platform, this exhibition looked to take a journey through aspects of masculinity and Heroism, tapping into art Historical sources to present Contemporary History Paintings. The small scale of the space added a new layer of absurdity to the grand scaled images.

The Dying Animal was a group exhibition where six artsits took Phillip Roth’s book ‘The dying animal’ as a starting point for a week of creation. Varsity said: “De Freston’s monoprints are restrained responses to the theme. The murky clouds of ink half-conceal couples engaged in sexual contortions borrowed from the Kama Sutra . The mottled ink slicks draw in the eye before unveiling the intertwined figures. Here is sex treated with measure and nuance, with a sense of privacy rather than voyeurism.”

On Air was a group exhibition including works by Tom de Freston, Miriam Austin, Fraser Stewart, Matthew Drage, Sarah Luddemann and Emily Taylor.