“The Seat of Desolation”: Miltonic depth in the work of Tom de Freston
Jaya Savige

“[N]ot, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves,.. “

W.H. Auden, In Praise of Limestone.

~

From an elevated perspective, the figures in Tom de Freston’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels might be laid out on a conveyer-belt, ferried like homogenised, factory-produced bodies for packaging; read top-to-bottom, they plummet as if down a sewerage pipe, flushed like refuse from an heavenly cistern.

Nine days and nights it takes for the rebel angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost to plunge “headlong from the Pitch of Heaven” through the abyss into the depths to hell, after their unsuccessful coup against God (I. 50, VI. 871; II.772). Milton’s rendition of depth is what the Romantic poets might have called sublime, at the limits of human comprehensibility. The word “deep” appears with insistent frequency in Milton’s epic, where it is accompanied by a litany of enhancing modifiers that emphasise the sublimity of the fall: vast, boundless, hollow, abhorred, hoarie, frighted, foaming.

In his 2009 exhibition, Reflections, Tom de Freston revealed an ongoing concern with the the fall – the biomechanics of the falling body, the eschatalogy of the fallen spirit or soul – in his Deposition altarpieces, and in myriad other canvasses (e.g. Icarus, Him Who Wanted to Fall) and monoprints (e.g. Study of Falling). In The Fall of the Rebel Angels and Where the Hell Are We?, two new works completed as part of a Leverhulme fellowship, de Freston transposes his ongoing investigation of this theme into a literary key, by explicitly responding to Milton’s epic.

These canvasses form a continuum with the earlier work, but they also mark a crucial, conceptual point of departure. This can be seen by comparing them with a formally similar work, Fast Judgement (2009), a canvas dominated by an oppressive sky that clamours with copulating and falling bodies, beneath which two figures pose on a yellow road – one in the foreground, beckoning the viewer; the other facing away and prostrate in the distance.

Whereas the sky-bound motley crew in Fast Judgement remains essentially inchoate, carnal and haphazard, the figures in Rebel Angels and Where the Hell have become hermetically sealed (though problematically so in the latter), sterilised and, perhaps most importantly, serialised, replicable.

For de Freston, Milton’s hell has now become “flattened, geometricized, ordered” – to use the words of Rosalind Krauss. With a nod to the ornamental grammar of William Morris’ wallpapers, and a wink at the pop-opacity of Warhol’s Marilyn screenprints, de Freston’s rebel angels are indeed serialised, petrified in a series of infernal pilates poses. The are condemned, like those figures of divine retribution, Prometheus or Sisyphus, to endure their abysmal lot in perpetuity; or like those “beasts that repeat themselves” that so terrify Auden in In Praise of Limestone.

And yet, de Freston inherently challenges what Krauss calls “modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” While he is evidently aware of what Clement Greenberg famously called the “medium specificity” of his art – the material paradox inherent in both the fact of the flatness of the canvass and the perspectival illusion of depth – de Freston neither submits entirely to the siren song of the surface (ornament or abstraction), nor asserts the priority of illusory depth (perspective); rather, he plays upon this tension, holding surface and depth in a suspended (and suspenseful), dialectical relationship.

As we saw at the outset, these canvases can be read either perspectivally or as self-consciously flat, aware of their materiality; that is, from side-on, or from above. In one sense, then, the idea of depth is itself the subject of these works, as de Freston transposes his concern with the fall not only into a literary key, but a painterly one. For de Freston, Milton simultaneously evokes the tyranny of the surface and the chimera of depth, a manichean conflict that defines both his vision and his art.

And what could be more aesthetically endemic, more representatively hellish in an age where the line between surface and depth has, in the eyes of many, become so utterly obfuscated by rampant commodity fetishism and political disinformation? It is worth recalling that Paradise Lost, which concerns a civil war (in heaven), was written during a time of civil war; and that de Freston, riffing here on the themes of surface and depth in late 2010, is doing so during a time of civil unrest and the quasi-Luciferean rebellion (in the name of transparency) of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Whereas the figures in Rebel Angels swivel in a greyish milky-blue through the darker, earthy tones drawn from the Deposition canvases, the pallette of Where the Hell is altogether more searing. Here, the fallen writhe in a concoction of stinging mustard, tumeric and ginger, an eye-wateringly radioactive curry-paste built upon an autumnal ochre base (indeed the colour of ‘fall’). Satan’s presence, central, almost serene, underscores his absence in Rebel Angels, which presents a preindividuated state. Less cadaverous than his jaundiced minions, he echoes the deposition of Christ, yet is ultimately modern, ironic, not quite shrugging but neither embracing the infernal air. These failed coupsters are truly, utterly “vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf” of “livid flame” (PL I. 52, 182).

“The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.” So writes Blake in his Proverbs of Hell, and whose vision of Hell wrenches all those that have gone before – Virgil, Dante, Milton – into modernity, by exposing the nature of the dialectical relation itself. In Where the Hell?, de Freston’s rebel angels spill out of their confines, their spectral presences haunting the pseudo-margins of the canvas. Taken together, these works comprise a meditation on the dialectics of opacity and transparency, surface and depth, so pertinent not only to the Miltonic fall, to that “dreary plain, forlorn and wild, / The seat of desolation, void of light” (I. 180-81), but to the artist’s own.

Jaya Savige is the author of Latecomers (2005) and Poetry Editor of The Australian. His poetry appears in the Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008) and The Best Australian Poems (2010). He is a PhD candidate in English and Gates Scholar at Christ’s College, Cambridge.