David Trigg De Freston speaks of wanting to inhabit Gericault’s painting, to understand its psychology by climbing into the skin of the raft’s occupants.
Matthew Holman The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting The ash, spoilage and charred remains are mixed into the paint, and are then embedded into resin-covered surfaces.
Tally de Orellana The Double Negative “Universes that blur boundaries of generation and audience.” Curator and art historian Tally de Orellana invites us into the dreamlike worlds of visual artist Tom de Freston…
John-Paul Pryor House Collective It was so unnerving when we walked around the space together because it was as if the safe divide between art and reality had crashed
James Cahill TLS “I’ve spent a career being told my approach is too much”, he says. “Too many images, too much movement between form, media, process, collaboration and meaning.”
Tally de Orellana Fused Death, despair, life and hope coexist in de Freston’s practice. Raft (2021) features a faceless character raising its hand towards the viewer, seemingly trapped between the confines of painted grids, escaping from the shades that surround them, stepping out of the painting and into reality.
Professor Lydia Goehr Routledge De Freston is interested in repetition insofar as this both gives character to a modernist mass-produced art and generates a comedy of cartoons that depends, as jokes, on the play of similarities or identities to generate dissonant (comic and provocative) differences.
Chloë Ashby Elephant Art “Glide your eye into the painting, onto the raft, up to the back and its outward-looking figures. Then skim across the surface of the sea like a flat stone, or dive in through the rough waves to the deep distance, to that ship. Climb on board. Now turn round. What do you see? Is there any life in that blackness, or is it all lost?”
Christiana Spens The Irish Times This meeting with the past has a curious effect of both helping the painter confront his own traumas and taking him away from the present in some way – enabling him to become a hermit, at times, when so entranced by the painting and so focused on his own projects.
David Trigg Studio International The paint-encrusted creatures that emerge from this and similar performances are integral to the development of each new painting or series, since they provide a way for de Freston to generate new visuals.
Dr Stephen K Owen Catalogue Essay Such points of loss are repeatedly turned to—savage cuts that provide an entry point of exploration, of possibility, where textual flesh is pulled apart, allowing a “tear or wound, laid open in the side of the real.”
Matilda Bathurst The Millions Perhaps, to submit to the ripping is the most honest way to live: to enter the rupture and look death in the eye. What we see is a living hell. What we see is the world we live in.
Grant Tabard Sabotage Review Would this monolith create a second sun? A poised, coiled artistic cannonade, this collection erupts in your hands, like a wrestling match with the Ark of the Covenant.
K. E. Gover Figuring Out Figurative Art - Routledge The collection of essays Figuring Out Figurative Art is based on an unusual and charming conceit
R. J. Dent R J Dent The Charnel House challenges the reader’s engagement with both subject and subject matter by the employment of ekphrasis
Sean Troth Trebuchet Magazine One of the major successes of de Freston’s imagery lies in the fantastically delicate positioning of the horrible and the harrowing with the everyday
Anna Ferari Trebuchet Magazine His work has little to do with the emphatic and aggrandising tradition of history painting and instead reflects on the stories of less well-known characters and people
Pablo de Orellana Strife Journal These instances of violence point to the moments of transition and choice of identification in relation to horsehead’s own politics of who he should be.
Hayden Westfield-Bell Sabotage Reviews Poetry is constantly changing. There are hundreds of poets out there right now, sharpening their lines, perfecting their rhythms and experimenting with structures new and old, but like all art forms some movements within the form gain traction more than others
Sam Rose From Figuring out Figurative Art And when they do reach the canvas—when the actual composition of the work is being created—each of these types of motif can determine new changes one after another.
Pablo de Orellana Strife Journal In Guernica the horse is the central motif in a maelstrom of activity. The whole body breaks, opens up and collapses across and down the centre of the canvas, yet the head is the key, the head is this half mechanical, half animalistic scream.
Toby Parker Rees Flaunt Magazine Every culture needs monsters. We have a fondness for the deeply interfused because life is a general tangle. Hybrid forms express this neatly—they’re not natural, but they’re applicable.
Aisha Farr Poet in the City From a critical perspective, the collection eludes the usual approaches to either paintings or to poems. This is perhaps its greatest strength.
Amandas Ong FRAME Featuring febrile, thick patterns of paint against calmer, flatter backgrounds, de Freston’s The Charnel House is a visual sensation
Simon Martin Catalogue Essay De Freston repeatedly depicts thresholds – not just in the physical sense of doorways or platforms like gangplanks above a chasm – but also in the sense of the point at which one starts to feel or react to something: a painterly provocation.
Christiana Spens The Quiet Us In De Freston’s most recent works, these conflicts are brought to a new crescendo, and a fresh relevance brought to modern preoccupations, secrets, and shame.
Staff Writer Time Out The artist confronts us with a tragic narrative of his horse-headed human figures
Dan Holloway Eightcuts He talks about repetitive structural devices in the history of painting, with the Deposition and Annunciation being archetypal forms. In the later the composition tends to landscape, with the staging split into two distinct halves, left and right.
Stephanie Sy-Quia Tank Magazine We’re still obsessed with the idea of the individual. People very quickly want to pigeonhole, but what really excites me is how our knowledge or ideas or creativity develop as we move from one medium to another.
Richard Cork Catalogue Essay De Freston ensures that his pigment coagulates in encrusted layers of impasto towards the shadowy base of this painting.
Laura Bushell Dazed & Confused As with the stage in theatre we are aware that it is an artificial construction. In both cases the artifice is constantly on the verge of collapsing.
Rye Holmboe Catalogue Essay Indeed, if these are to be considered dystopian visions – and I think they should be – it is important to note that there is no sense of apocalyptic finality.
Christina Spens Studio International This is not idol-worship, but clear, honest illumination of what it means to believe in resurrection – in either religion or art
Sir Nicholas Serota Catalogue Essay The paintings have been designed to respond to the unique spatial, spiritual and aesthetic demands of the Chapel and the subject of the Deposition has been chosen to complement the presence in the antechapel of Sir Anthony Caro’s sculpture on the same theme.
