Sean Crossley, a young painter from Australia who has lived in Brussels for a number of years, presents his first exhibition at Harlan Levey Projects, in which he bypasses the pitfalls of style and subject in his enigmatic paintings.
Sean Crossley: Recreational Painting at Harlan Levey Projects
We don’t believe for a second that Sean Crossley’s paintings are merely a leisure activity. The skill and depth of the work would suggest quite the contrary. The recreational activities evoked by the title could perhaps refer to the subjects, but that’s not an entirely satisfactory explanation either. In fact, it is difficult to find a link or even a common style between the different pieces being exhibited.
A scene from a ball at the court of the Sun King, seen through the eyes of a nineteenth-century cartoonist. Fans, hooped petticoats, and wigs dancing a minuet. Two portraits like passport photos, or an interior design in deep nocturnal colors.
Each canvas is completed, copied, using a different source, a print from the nineteenth century, a page from a magazine, a portrait of the actor Simone Genevois, who played Joan of Arc. We could go on like this for each of the canvases.
Sean Crossley: Recreational Painting at Harlan Levey Projects
It’s clearly not the subject that interests Sean Crossley, but the painting itself, or rather, the act of reproducing an image. Why paint? What makes up the identity of a painting, as opposed to a photograph, a print, or reality itself? These are the kinds of questions the painter asks himself. There is clearly great skill involved. A fluid stroke that he deliberately leaves incomplete, colors that he subdues.
Trained in realistic figurative painting, it is a part of him that he has attempted to free himself from without ever really succeeding. He cannot escape the figurative in his work, so he looks for ways that he can accept it, while also trying to find other routes, which avoid narration.
Sean Crossley: Le Menuet (after F. Gorguet) - study, 2019
He achieves this through repetition, and through splitting or copying images. One of the canvases in the exhibition is not a reproduction of an existing image. In it, you can catch a glimpse of the true Crossley style. It’s called Body Clock. In it, he depicts friends who came to visit him. They talked, they drank, he painted a fragmented jigsaw puzzle of their time together. Tomorrow, he will try a different style. To pass the time and to put his paintbrushes to use.
SEAN CROSSLEY: RECREATIONAL PAINTING > 6/7, Harlan Levey Projects
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