28 January - 6 March 2005
Croxson produces a number of types of paintings which tend not to be made in series, but rather are ongoing groups of works to be added to if and when. They are beguiling and often beautiful things, but they usually engender a level of doubt and misprision. On sheets of old ply there are paintings containing irregularly placed images of pasty faced and introspective men, sick and dribbling. They look like forsaken religious figures and down and outs, but these saints and sinners are often taken from images of footballers or celebrities culled from newspapers, or any number of arbitrary sources. There is a loose structure or hierarchy in the placing of the characters, but the artist seems to be messing up the system as well as systematising the mess. These are poetic, whimsical paintings loved up with lop-sided lyricism and full of mismatched collisions and mistaken identifies and rich in painterly conceits. The paintings reveal signs of happenstance counteracted by habitual repetition (of motifs), but serendipity and invention are confused like virtuosity and mendacity.
A number of artists including Max Ernst and Jasper Johns have employed versions of the psychologist’s test of a duck-cum-rabbit image in their work. Croxson has his own versions such as lightning strikes that look like penises emanating out of clouds that morph into trees; rain that could be tears and babies heads that hollow out to become skulls. Eyes turn into pools and pools loop into hair-dos that become wheels on smoking death carts. Teeth motifs abound and if we accept Freud’s analysis, they signal doubt and performance anxiety, but they are also just blobs of paint, spatial markings that both flatten the picture plain and deepen the implied perspective.
Painting has a directness. The medium is just coloured dirt really, but this unformed goo can potentially become anything you want it to be. As Croxson’s paintings become more and more sophisticated his tendency to obfuscate is increasingly strategic as he finds more ways to make work that appears clumsy. It is full of contradictions. The obvious meets the unfathomable in these strange but familiar, heady-sweet, silky dark concoctions.
Roy Voss
Jan 2005
World's Deposition 2005
Oil on linen, 61 x 56cm
Mushroom Cloud 2005
Oil on linen, 41 x 36cm