A friend in need: the role of art and friendship in healing trauma
In Wreck, visual artist Tom de Freston interrogates the role of art in healing from repressed personal trauma, and how this is linked into wider communal and historical traumas. Drawing on his own experience, he beautifully expresses the need to paint as a response to trauma, linking his personal narrative and the state of mind it affects to the complex story of suffering and corruption behind Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa.
He has long been obsessed by the painting, which bears horrible similarity to the drownings of migrants in the Mediterranean in recent years.
De Freston also highlights the desire, implicit in such artistic practise, to be in dialogue with others, both historically and contemporarily. Engaging with Géricault as well as his sources, and the catastrophe that inspired the great painting, he finds real meaning and solidarity in the life and work of a man painting 200 years before himself.
Pic: In Wreck, Tom de Freston links his personal narrative and the state of mind it affects, to the complex story of suffering and corruption behind Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Photograph: Christophel Fine Art/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
