Installation view - Rumours of Treasure, 2024. Photo: Vitor Lopes
Short film by Christoph Ashok, documenting the process and thoughts behind the paintings of 2023 and 2024.
Installation view - Rumours of Treasure, 2024. Photo: Vitor Lopes
“The detritus in Darke’s paintings are idiograms removed from and of context. Their reading is left only to their audience. Picture frames, soft animals, blankets, televisions, briefcases – dual symbols of domesticity and displacement – are handled with synchronic care and curiosity by families, ghosts, nomads and drifters. These are people seeking answers for both past and present; picking like magpies for a narrative explanation of the state of their own surroundings. The tension between these figures' cognition of semiotic value and the material emptiness that surrounds them underscores a profound reversal of conventional systems of value – no longer grounded in the Real but in the imagined, the symbolic, the immediate and experiential.” - Victoria Comstock-Kershaw
All work © Freddie Darke 2025