Daniel Freaker: Fantastical, Relatable, Material

“I have tried all I can to draw and paint from imagination,” Daniel Freaker tells me, “but I actually can’t.” This isn’t what I expected to hear. We are together in his Portsmouth studio looking at a series of new paintings, all of which look like works of fiction to me. They depict unlikely spaces, out-of-place structures and anonymous characters in imaginative colour palettes. Platform of Beyond shows an anonymous woman stood atop a concrete staircase on the grassy bank of some body of water; at the centre of Font of Knowledge, an image of an abandoned institutional-looking room, is a bottomless pit; in Cuboid and Pines a pony stands, looking away from the viewer, in front of a modernist house surrounded by dense woodland. If not the artist’s imagination, I wonder where these paintings do come from.

They are, I learn, built around a constellation of influences and references that range from Philip K Dick’s novels to brutalist architecture. They might not be pure imagination - maybe they are best described as assemblages - but the part the artist plays in putting them together is crucial. “I’m particularly drawn to evocative spaces, landscapes and architecture where the space somehow echoes a human experience,” he tells me of the settings he chooses for his paintings. He sometimes places characters or signs of human activity against these backgrounds, suggesting that they might be the settings for untold stories, but not always. Sometimes the infrastructure itself is enough to capture the viewer’s imagination. In Architecture of Assent, a deserted set of concrete steps leads up an overgrown bank. Where do they lead? Who were they built for? Here, as in all of Freaker’s work, narrative ambiguity is a key component. He is more interested in inspiring questions than providing answers.

“As a figurative painter, I am looking for a language of experience that is visceral and more primal than words.” He is clearly not interested in telling the viewer a story with a beginning, middle and end. Instead, he sets up his compositions to give just enough information and suggestion for the viewer to fill in the blanks in their own way. Though they could be set in the same technicoloured universe, there is no narrative link between the works and within each picture is the same lack of a clear storyline. We are simply given a set of objects, symbols, spaces and characters and the freedom to interpret them on our own terms. Naturally, elements of different images will resonate with different viewers for different reasons; “I can’t know what the audience has experienced in detail,” the artist explains, “but I am looking for things that have touched me.” An element of a painting that arrests one viewer could be invisible, or relevant for a completely different reason, to another. This lack of prescriptiveness is partly influenced by filmmakers like Chris Marker, Terrence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky: “the films are about human experience rather than fascinating plot lines and effects.” 

As well as in the composition and content, there is a filmic quality to the material form of the paintings. Each canvas is laden with vertical streaks of paint that have been left to drip down its surface, leaving residue from each layer of the work and allowing them to blend into one at points. This creates an effect that he calls a “flicker”. Like the flicker of a reel to reel film, it reminds the viewer that they are (at least) one step removed from the subject. The paint intervenes in the image, making itself known as the ultimate reality of what we are looking at. The flicker feels like a nod or a wink from the artist, gently letting the viewer know that, though it is easy to get lost in the worlds of his pictures, they are really just paint on canvas. This is the subtle journey that Freaker takes us on: from the fantastical to the relatable and, ultimately, back to the material.