This painting brings together 19th realist painting, political caricature from the 20th century and pulls a child’s dream from the pages of Claude Ponti’s ‘Le chien invisible’. The top half...
This painting brings together 19th realist painting, political caricature from the 20th century and pulls a child’s dream from the pages of Claude Ponti’s ‘Le chien invisible’. The top half of the work is taken from a Gustave Courbet painting ‘Les Demoiselles des bords de la Seine (été), which blurs down into a cartoon of a forest floor. The work is very layered, images such as political cartoons depicting Churchill and ‘time’ are fused and blurred into the centre/background. The work presents itself as a page, or a document, following Crossley's archive work during a residency at the Bibliothèque des arts decoratifs in Paris prior to this painting. It’s a transitional painting, crystalised as a kind of game playing with ‘reality’, and realism. For the artist, this was a first step into a broader understanding of his paintings as pages and painting as an extended practice that resembles writing.