After Party

Daniel Freaker studied at the Slade School of Art, London. His early work explored the painterly possibilities of print, video, film and photography, with these interests evident in the narrative quality of his more recent paintings suggesting fragments of film scenes.

Existing between abstraction and figuration, Freaker’s work places equal value on application as well as subject – the way in which paint is applied is equally as important as what it depicts. Some details may be carefully defined whilst other passages of paint might suggest a feeling or an idea. This way of working allows Freaker to build up dense pictorial surfaces, interweaving unusual processes and textures into paintings which are at once nostalgic, beautiful and painful.

Daniel Freaker's memorable moments of connection, loss, vulnerability or loneliness - may see the viewer feeling that they have stumbled upon a private moment. Together with this, and the juxtaposition of light and dark, accident and intention, order and chaos, the voyeuristic intention in his nuanced storytelling is illuminated. Often isolated, introspective and evoking a kind of contemporary ennui, his figures may be heavy-hearted, but he offsets the blues of their longing with a palette of radiant bursts of colour, a system of contrasts not dissimilar to the workings of our own memories.