• Antony Crossfield, hand to hand with flesh

    "By including all the diversity and defects usually erased of bodies by digital transformations, my goal is to prompt a visceral answer from the viewer, involving himself phisically and intellectually."

    Antony Crossfield

     

    Antony Crossfield, Screen, 2009

                                              ©Antony Crossfield
                                                     Screen, 2009
                                                     Foreign bodies
                                                     All rights reserved

    The work Foreign bodies by Antony Crossfield put our relation with our body to a test, as it is by nature or as we want it to be, by making us faced saturated flesh bodies.


                            ©Antony Crossfield
                                Foreign Body 1, 2003
                                Foreign bodies
                                All rights reserved

     

    As he could adopt the same approach as Lucian Freud, by photographing flabby, limp and fatty bodies, Antony Crossfield is going further thanks to the use of digital retouch, handled like a paintbrush. It is a real plea for body, skin and wrinkles that the spectator is invited to watch. 

    He chooses to exceed the obsolete idea of conceiving photography as the simple witness of a truth that was just capable of pointing up "the Cartesian idea of a disembodied self", wich means the distinction between body and mind which leads to two different entities.

    Antony Crossfield presents crossed bodies (as his name is crossing fields), made of several intertwined  and interweaved bodies, becoming one. Where does the first end ? Where does the second begin ? Is there a first and a second ?

     

    Trap, 2005

                                  ©Antony Crossfield
                                       Trap, 2005
                                       Foreign bodies
                                       All rights reserved

     

    The artist abolishes the distance, as thin as it is, between two body who were faced, watched, touched itselves in some places, reducing it to a one and only flesh, key concept of french philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Antony Crossfield shows us a clear reference to him in his snapshots.

    This perception link is that strong that it opens the world to things, beings, and it is under our eyes as an accumulation of bodies which cancels the idea of a body clay, with all the boundaries this condition requires. The link is reinvented as "an organ of physical and mental exchanges between bodies".

     

    Threshold, 2009

                                            ©Antony Crossfield
                                                   Threshold, 2009
                                                   Foreign bodies
                                                   All rights reserved

     

    Even if Antony Crossfield's creatures are appearing clearly unreal, the power of photography is showing us our relation to every things that surround us, with an invitation to realize we are maybe at one with the content of his work.

     


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