Elisa Crossing: MOVE ME!

Elisa Crossing
Where there’s fact, there’s friction 2026
oil on linen
140 x 120 cm

Open Saturday 1 August, 2026. Exhibition runs until 31 August

Move me! is my instinctive response to the question: what do I want paintings to do? 

Move me! is an exploration of the active and embodied nature of looking. It builds on the theme of “slow looking” which has been central to my practice for many years and is a position that runs counter to the ethos of the digital economy venerating speed and promising us the joy of ‘frictionless’ experiences. For me, friction is essential to the process of painting and how we make meaning from it.

Incorporating scenes of the artist ‘s studio, the site of active looking, and inspiration from the bodily rhythm implied in Fragonard’s painting The Swing, these paintingshave been made to mirror the to and fro of the painter in the studio, leaning forward to paint and stepping back to reflect.  Up close, details in the painting dissolve into abstraction and sensation; from a distance, rhythms, structures, and contexts emerge. From this oscillation between intimacy and distance it is revealed that seeing is never fixed or complete.

 It follows that these paintings also have no fixed narratives. Rather they are about spaces, proximity, attraction, and resistance — about the friction at the borders where ideas meet and generate harmonies or dissonances.  Like the suspended figure in the Swing, these works shift between past and present, abstraction and reality, the artist and the viewer. Their meaning remains to be made by the viewer who is moved to see, to feel, and to reflect.

– Elisa Crossing, May 2026