Across from the turnstiles in the 'Bourse' metro stop, there is a set of escalators, which in Crossley's painting are turned into a kind of cognitive or neurological system. An...
Across from the turnstiles in the "Bourse" metro stop, there is a set of escalators, which in Crossley's painting are turned into a kind of cognitive or neurological system. An analogy perhaps drawn from the head-down cliché experience of the body, but also the persistent recurrence of staircases throughout modernism as a symbolic threshold, or a motif of ascension or comprehension. Via this prism, an automatic staircase that was broken down or out of order seems a quite fitting subject for a postmodern/ contemporary painting today. Crossley's improvised, almost calligraphic painting process renders the subject useless, while developing a more abstract gesturing of information that pushes and pulls the levels and grounds of this space.
Crossley: "It is important to mention that I worked on "Cirulateur" and "Echangeur" at the same time. At a certain point where the composition was blocked in "Echangeur", I recognized the importance of a specific detail (a strange metallic cylinder placed between the turnstiles), which reflected the two spaces. I began to paint a distorted reflection of one painting in the other, which in turn lead to a cycle of editing each painting after the other. In this way, these intrinsically orientated pictures manage to reach out across the room to each other in an explicitly extrinsic manner."