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Pablo De Orellana

Charnel house, horses, art and conflict: Interview with Tom de Freston

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Pablo de Orellana interviews artist Tom de Freston on nature of strife and conflict in his latest paintings on show at Breese Little Gallery.

I am at the Bresse Little Gallery, surrounded by twelve large canvases by the artist Tom de Freston. They are powerful political paintings which balance a staggering array of painterly approaches and iconography- horse headed figures, pot plants, nods to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, crucifixions and last judgements. Over the course of two hours of interview, we covered a breadth of subjects related to the paintings on show, which made me strikingly aware that these were not in any way didactic paintings, but rather images which open up a depth and range of dialogues. The transcript below is the edited version of this interview.

Danae
Tome de Freston

Pablo de Orellana: Can you tell us why your latest show is called ‘The Charnel House’?

Tom de Freston: There were a few things I wanted the title to allude to. Historically, charnel houses were buildings near churches where the bones from grave digging could be stored. It has passed in to more common parlance to mean a place which houses death, and is often part of the vocabulary of horror fiction. More specifically it is a nod to the Picasso painting of the same title, which was made just after the end of WWII, in a mirror of the way Guernica was made in the build up to WWII. It is a painting which nods to the horrors of the holocaust, setting the fear and mutilation within a domestic setting. Picasso made the unimaginable scale of the suffering of the war and the holocaust specific to one family, which paradoxically and distressingly ups the level of pathos.

The nod to Picasso is obviously overt in the work, most particularly the horses heads which are clearly borrowed from Guernica, which appear obsessively everywhere. Can you tell us more about these?

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. For me it is the most powerful single snapshot from any painting I know in regards to the horrors of war, even more visceral than anything Goya came up with. It is a scream of innocents, even more powerful than the child in the mothers arm to the left of the picture. As such it has, even in the paintings a clear metaphorical dimension. It is obviously a work which deals explicitly with the specifics of the events in Guernica on the 26th of April 1937, during the Spanish civil war. Yet it goes beyond this and talks about more universal themes. It is the power of that which drew me to lifting the motif and borrowing it from new ends.

Having said all that, I think it is important to distinguish the role of Guernica as a source from the broader iconography of horses in art history. When I think of horses I think of the long succession of ridiculous paintings of leaders parading on horses, glorified leaders into war, with the horse as a symbol of the state and the leader therefore as a figure in total command of his people. Velasquez (Prince Baltasar Carlos on Horseback 1635-36) and J. L. David (Napoleon Crossing the Alps- 1800) are two of the most absurd examples. As such I think all the horse heads, to an extent, have echoes of this type of metaphorical content. The horse is not just a single motif, but a character, or perhaps more a whole case of horse headed characters.

Mother Wept
Tome de Freston

All of which seems to ignore the fact that we are not looking at horses, as with Picasso, but horse-headed people. Where does this anthropomorphic tendency come from and what is its function?

Yes, quite. I wanted to create a central protagonist which was absolutely other, and then to build a world and a fragmented narrative around this character. The horse head provides an ideal model for this. The history of characters with animal heads and human bodies is obviously very rich and is present in mythologies from almost all cultures across the world. There are horse headed figures in various myths (Kinnara in some versions of the Indian myth and Tikbalang in Phillipine folklore), but they are not anything like as familiar as many other hybrid characters. This relative anonymity meant I could construct a mutated mythology around the horse-headed character.

I want to come back later to what appears quite a literary approach, but despite being other these characters are explicitly human in many of their actions. They take baths, look after pot plants, live in houses and shit on the toilet. As to the latter, why is one of your characters having such a horrendous time in the loo?

(Laughing) When put like that it sounds like I might be making adverts for diarrhoea or constipation relief. I’m not sure any marketing team would sanction this particular episode though. The figures on the loo are always slight nods to the Francis Bacon triptych of George Dyer on the loo, which depict the evening he committed suicide in 1971 in their Paris Hotel room. But I more broadly think of bathrooms as the most private of all domestic spaces, and the loo as the pinnacle of this. So any picture of someone on the loo feels like an invasion, a voyeuristic intrusion into someone’s life - in a way not to dissimilar to the Murdoch empires betrayal of privacy exposed by the Leveson enquiry. The figures on the loo tell us the viewer, the Tom peeping through the window, that this is a space we should not be entering.

Split
Tome de Freston

Is this privacy apparent in all the paintings?

I am amazed that in Mother Wept people find the image of the man on the loo more disturbing than the image of a mother holding her screaming, perhaps dead, child. I think that says a lot about our engagement and exposure to images of grief and suffering. That said the man on the loo is distressing, clearly in the process of evacuating his bowels from two ends. I wanted to find a physical embodiment of an emotional torment, to make what was happening inside visual in the crudest of forms. It is not as if you actually see any crap or vomit, but the mere suggestion of its production seems to be enough to insight a reaction. But I am very conscious of not wanting to make work which is about sensation. Jake and Dinos Chapman do that brilliantly, as do many other artists of their generation, but it is not something I am so interested in pursuing. I am not nihilistic in that same way.

Spectacle is obviously present in some of the images of violence. I am thinking about the crucifixions scenes but also the paintings which nod to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib. Can you tell us about this political strife in the work (excuse the pun)?

I don’t want to make work which is Political with a capital “P”, and certainly have no interest in making didactic painting. But the paintings of waterboarding and the nod to the mistreatment of inmates in Abu Grabi obviously situates the work in that realm. With the waterboarding I was less interested in making a comment on the rights and wrongs of waterboarding (despite having clear personal views on this) and more interested in depicting the obvious suffering such an acts induces, regardless of whether marks are left or not. In ‘Split’ I did have the incidents at Abu Graib, involving people such as Lynndie England, in mind. But again, I was more broadly interested in depicting the type of things humans are capable of doing to each than making any explicit political comment about those incidents. ‘Pandora’ is a follow up to this, depicting what appears to be four conjoined figures emerging like a jack in a box out of the picture frame, a clear doubling of the couple conjoined in ‘Split’. I suppose my interest is less in a political agenda and more in dealing with the nature of the aesthetics of war, terror and violence in contemporary society and the manner in which we, the often detached viewer, engage in the spectacle of such images.

Pandora
Tome de Freston

Tell us more about what you mean by this, in regards to the ‘spectacle of the images’.

I suppose I have Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’ in mind, which whilst a Marxist ramble, is incredibly eloquent in describing and foreseeing the relationship between modern media and our consumption of imagery. Debord spoke about the role 24-hour news coverage had on us, desensitising and anaesthetising us to footage of suffering, through repetitive exposure. That problem has only got worse- through the mass of imagery and coverage through social media, the internet as a news feed, and general developments in technology, media and communication. It is the paradox of being so connected to all this suffering and simultaneously enacting a detachment. I suppose I am interested in making paintings that explore this process.

Is this not just the kind of nihilistic tendency you said you were not interested in pursuing?

I don’t think so, because I am not interested in just mirroring this process back at the viewer, but rather engaging with this process to find relevant and effective ways to re-engage a viewer. It relates to my broader interest in a question of whether Tragedy as a dramatic convention has developed processes and a lexicon which works in contemporary culture. Which is all very wishy-washy so I will try and give examples. The paintings might initially appear to be comic: odd horses, lurid colours, silly visual puns and strange cute cat -dogs. But I want this comedy and the absurdity to disarm people, which is also what I want from the clash of stylistic approaches and the staging of the scenes. So that the comedy on the surface is a device to unlock the tragedy, as if it is a key to making the viewer feel empathy. I suppose ultimately, however ridiculous the horse headed figures are, however excessive or repetitive the actions are, eventually I want them to care for the character. So that the distancing that is enacted by the process of ‘othering’ the figure, by giving it a horse head, is eventually one of the devices which makes us think, this could just as easily be me, my family, my body, my home.

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Pablo de Orellana is the founder of Strife and editor as well as relentless art lover and sometime curator.

Tom de Freston is a painter based in Oxford, represented by Breese Little Gallery (London). In September 2012 Gatehouse Press published “House of the Deaf Man” a collection of drawings and paintings by Tom and poems by Andrea Porter in response to Goya’s time in “La Quinta del Sordo”. His work can be seen at www.tomdefreston.co.uk. He has previously contributed to Strife Journal with an analysis of painting and conflict read through Goya’s paintings which you can read on Strife Journal Issue I.

Tom de Freston: The Charnel House
Breese Little Gallery
30b Great Sutton Street
London, EC1V 0DU
more details here: http://www.breeselittle.com/#/future-tom-de-freston/4580133901
Online exhibition catalogue available here: http://issuu.com/breeselittle/docs/tom_de_freston_-_e.catalogue_-_bree?e=8048082/5574462

Italian Elections stalemate: Berlusca Bunga Bunga, Rigor Mortis, A Retired Priest, the Communist and a Clown. An Analysis.

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By Pablo De Orellana

This is not a joke. These are the nicknames of the principal politicians participating in the election, except for the priest and the clown. The latter cannot participate in person, but has been the underestimated wildcard in this this shuffle of Italian fortunes.

On Sunday, three women hurled themselves naked at Silvio Berlusconi howling “Basta Berlusconi” [“Enough Berlusconi”], in one of many and desperate signs of the overdrawn exhaustion of the Italian political class and the loathing that it has garnered among voters. Berlusconi is still politically alive and kicking in yet another election campaign. This is because of the incredible challenges facing Italy and especially the deep unpopularity of the Monti technocrat government. The difficulties and brutal cuts of Italy’s latest austerity drive cannot be overstated. The trouncing of Monti’s hopes in this election is proof of this clearly expressed resentment.

This is not a common election. At first sight the results (see below for detailed breakdown) appear to reflect the old right-left divide, with reincarnations of the old DC (Christian Democratic Party) and PS (Socialist Party) –the originals died drowned in the embezzled funds of the Tangentopoli scandal in the 1990s. There are, however, a number of new wildcards complicating the equation. Most importantly, Italy has not seen circumstances so dire for a generation with a stagnant economy, record unemployment and rapidly falling living standards.

Mario “Rigor Mortis” Monti is the loathed bogeyman of this election. Most political discourse in this campaign has been written and spoken in reference Italy’s financial credibility, which Monti has promised to fix with increasing doses of austerity bloodletting. The proverbial straw was the IMU tax, a levy on the value of a household’s primary property. This has caused exasperation in a country where low and middle earners are already very heavily taxed, with horror stories of bankrupt families due to the IMU. In some regards, Monti too has been an unconventional saviour of Italian finances. In Italy’s past debt scares (they happen every decade) una tantum (‘once only’) taxes were levied on luxury properties such as second and third homes, luxury cars, capital gains, bonuses. Monti, on the other hand, can be credited with importing European Neo-Conservative economics, with the resulting faith in public service cuts and increased taxation of the most numerous part of the population - who on average make little more than 900 per month (INSEE data) - rather than higher earners or corporations such as Berlusconi’s own Mediaset Group. Not unlike George Osborne, Monti’s entire programme is ostensibly designed to uphold the credibility of Italy’s credit ratings. Monti has run in this election as leader of a coalition of small centrist parties, although their parliamentary weight is negligible at just over 10% of the vote. This is clear proof of the great resentment that austerity measures have elicited in Italy.

Italy’s centre-left party grouping, the Partito Democratico (PD) led by Pier Luigi (aka “ex-Communist”) Bersani, has been a great disappointment both in campaign and in today’s results. PD promised to keep the course and spirit of Monti’s reforms - albeit with a few concessions to the need for growth measures - and indeed looked likely to form a coalition with Monti. This unexciting passive acceptance of the austerity dogma has alienated many supporters and has allowed other protest candidates to trounce its advantage in polls over the last few weeks. In last night’s results, PD is basically tied in voting percentages with Berlusconi’s alliance of conservative parties and only just ahead of Beppe Grillo’s 5-Star Movement. Italy’s puzzlingly complex voting laws give the PD bloc extra bonus seats, which should make the lower house just about governable.

Then come the rogues: the ones defined by opposition to the Monti administration and austerity policies. The most puzzling aspect of this election, and one that foreign analysts seem to miss, is that Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi has, in an incredible piece of high-speed historical reframing, recast himself as a rebel, a transgressor to the Merkel-imposed austerity dogma and calling into question Euro membership, the EU, Mario Monti’s reforms and budget cuts. Most spectacularly, only a few days ago Berlusconi made the extraordinary promise of returning paid IMU tax to taxpayers if elected. He is now at the head of the second biggest group in the Lower House.

Machiavelli was right in decrying his indignation at Italy being saddled with the Papal Curia, and the Vatican has had varying policies in its involvement with Italian democracy, from sometimes banning the faithful from voting, to sanctioning specific parties. Yet another unusual factor, one that might be overlooked is the Pope’s resignation. Whilst in recent years the Church has not attempted to excommunicate stray voters and has adopted subtler means, its influence cannot be underestimated. It is likely that the Vatican’s temporary distraction has been to the disadvantage of conservatives and especially Mario Monti’s group.

Finally, the greatest surprise to those not accustomed to Italy’s political volatility and unfamiliar with recent economic woes is the success of the party led by comedian Beppe “Clown” Grillo, the 5-Star Movement. It has exceeded all projections, and is now the single largest party in the lower house (although it is outdone by the centre right and centre left alliances). It stood on a simple basis: reforming the overpaid, corrupt, rentier, clientelist and mafia-tainted nature of Italian politics by “sending the old [politicians] home”; reforming Italy’s economic course towards fairer taxation, limiting the rampant tax evasion of the richest individuals and corporations, removing austerity policies and encouraging higher employment and stemming Italy’s tragic graduate brain drain.

Considering Monti’s very poor showing, this Movement’s surprise showing is all the more important: The 5-Star Movement now holds the balance of power in the lower house. Grillo has declared that he wants no alliance with the old parties, and this is further complicated by the Movement’s staunch anti-austerity policy. I suspect that, barring fresh elections to resolve this stalemate, PD will have to make concessions to the Movement to be able to govern; but considering Bersani’s strongly-worded disapproval of the comedian’s protest party and its policies, this seems unlikely.

This election is not only a stalemate, but speaks of the worldwide dilemmas of democracy, finance, debt and the economic future of Europe. Sadly, the stalemate is fodder for market instability, political instability and stagnation. It is not clear who has won this election; what is clear is that there is one loser: Italy.

Dante Alighieri put it better than I ever could. Reader, I will let you translate these sad verses.

Italia, poi che se’ sì grande
che per mare e per terra batti l’ali,
e per lo ‘nferno tuo nome si spande!
Tra li ladron trovai cinque cotali
tuoi cittadini onde mi ven vergogna,
e tu in grande orranza non ne sali.

Dante, Inferno, XXVI, 1-6

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Detailed election results in full as well as the fine detail of Italy’s complex electoral laws can be found on <http://elezioni.interno.it/camera/scrutini/20130224/C000000000.htm> [last accessed 26 February 2013]