Tom de Freston
- From Darkness

The title of Tom de Freston’s (b. 1983, London) exhibition at No20 Arts, located in a palatial townhouse in Angel, Islington, is ominous yet suggests the shoots of new life: From Darkness. It refers to at least two transformational events. In a ferocious bomb blast in Syria in 1997, Professor Ali Souleman, a critic and lecturer in drama and theatre, lost his sight. In early 2020, a month before the first lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19, a fire gutted de Freston’s studio in Oxford. Twelve years of work was lost. A result of four years of collaboration with Souleman and documentary-maker Mark Jones, and energised by de Freston’s instinctual creative force to rebuild amid the debris and destruction of the devastating studio blaze, From Darkness demanded much from its audience. Its themes are sight and insight, and its subject wrestles with the capacity of art to render the invisible in material forms. ‘No light, but rather darkness visible’, as John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost. De Freston’s works flicker with those words. Blindness and loss are not synonymous with nothing at all.

De Freston was determined to integrate form and function in these new works. The ash, spoilage and charred remains are mixed into the paint, and are then embedded into resin-covered surfaces. In At the cliff edge (all works 2021), several footprints overlap and coalesce. Bordered by blood reds or chalk whites, they resemble more the markings of the forensic detective investigating a murder than the traces of the traveller who, after an arduous ascent, surveys the depths below. De Freston compares the moment to the cliff scene in Shakespeare’s King Lear, when Poor Tom leads a blind Gloucester to an imaginary edge. Many of the paintings, such as this, bear markings of a spray-painted mathematical grid, which might suggest something of the cartographic organisation of space or an architectural interior, but are drenched below the porous yet violent oils. There is no spatial order to rationalise the world here. Indeed, many of the paintings have been folded, left to weather and gather new marks, like a self-perpetuating cadavre exquis replicating new forms out of ruin into an uncertain future. 

Other paintings, like Submergence, seem animated entirely by the terror of impending catastrophe: an upturned ledge or plank on a spiralling disc sends two legs flying. Life-changing injury or even death lurks outside the canvas. The spattering of paint resembles at once haematological droplets or tiny molecules hurtling through space. Lens features two orbs in space: the filmic receptacle for seeing as in the title but also entire worlds or planets. Losing sight, or losing one’s entire body of work, might feel like the end of the world. De Freston’s paintings get close to depicting what that feels like.