Peter De Francia

In 1987, Peter de Francia retired after fourteen years as Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, and his achievement as teacher and artist was honoured with a major retrospective at the Camden Arts Centre. In an essay for a catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Timothy Hyman explains:

'In his drawing sequences de Francia has over the last fifteen years achieved something close to a vernacular, a ready and transparent tongue by which to build a human comedy, the whole crowded pageant and carnival’.

De Francia’s drawings are familiar to many people – his peaceful scenes of figures by the sea, his poignant studies of pilgrims and wanderers across the world. Many of his drawings are based on classical mythology – the stories of Prometheus, Daedulus, the Minotaur – and as such are worlds where nude figures can exist in a state where sexuality is free, and uncomplicated.

In his recent series however, de Francia’s comic and whimsical side is not in evidence. This drawing sequence, of over forty images, begins with two nude lovers, curled together, asleep, perhaps dreaming. But the series that follows is kind of `novella’ of brutality – a nightmare of mental and sexual abuse, of abuse of power and gender. Although the figures in this series retain their characteristic powerful figurative presence, their sexuality is no longer their own. Tied and beaten, men and women are tortured and humiliated, are forced to watch their lovers and their children abused, while they look helplessly on. They are victims, but retain their nobility in the face of lounging, grinning guards and infantile cruelty.

By not specifying the colour of the victims, the site of the brutalities, or confining the victims to one sex, de Francia forces us to look head-on at universal conditions – not only political and social – but those at the heart of our common soul.