Tom de Freston makes narrative paintings that tend to take a particular theatrical, literary or art historical source as a start point. My recent projects have involved collaborations with theatre companies and/or poets. De Freston is currently working with the Theatre Director Max Barton on The Golem project. Taking Gustav Meyrink’s novel as stimulus for a new body of paintings and a play Literary and theatrical sources act as a start point, before then employing a wider range of image making strategies and processes (photography, performance and collage) to develop ideas. The artist’s paintings often consist of domestic spaces, theatrical stages and barren landscapes populated with masked, animalistic or caricatured characters, dealing with dystopian narratives, mutated mythology and appropriated art historical imagery. The scenes are frequently in danger of being engulfed by thick pools of paint, threatening the order with chaos. The paintings provide windows onto stages littered with uncanny signifiers, providing the viewers with access to worlds which are unknown but familiar.
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