Elisa Crossing, Intermission, 2026, oil on linen. Photo: Civic Art Bureau.
Elisa Crossing has been exhibiting in Canberra since 1986. She has been associated with the Canberra School of Art, in its various manifestations, for much of her professional life, initially as a student and subsequently as a lecturer.
Over the years she has developed a peculiar artistic language in which there is a tension between a cerebral conceptual framework and the quite sensuous resolution of the work.
Her exhibition at the Civic Art Bureau consists of 19 ‘clever paintings’ that combine closely observed realistic detail with an ambiguous frame of reference, at times laced with a bit of dry wit.
One could say that virtually everything that one sees in her paintings does exist in the observable world or in other paintings, but not in the same configurations as one discovers in her works.
She loves conceptual games of placing paintings within paintings, playing with fragments of deserted airports, merging interior and exterior spaces, and using reflections and patterns.
She appears to enjoy stopping the viewer in their tracks, inviting them to enter and explore the painting, and to discover or invent their own reality within it.
There is frequently a semantic game involved in the titles of her paintings and exhibitions, one called the self-explanatory Slow looking and the present exhibition titled ‘Move me!’
The artist explains that the title is drawn from the question a viewer may pose to the artist: what does the painter want from her audience? She wants the viewer to be moved by the paintings.
Elisa Crossing, 5 o’clock shadow, 2026, oil on linen, 61 x 92cm, Photo: Civic Art Bureau.
“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, which venerates speed and promises us the joy of ‘frictionless’ experiences,” Crossing explains,
“For me, friction is essential to the process of painting and how we make meaning from it.”
If we engage with one of her smaller canvases, 5 o’clock shadow, it is built on a series of objects found within an interior space and caught within a web of shadows.
The colloquial meaning of 5 o’clock shadow is the short stubble that appears on a bloke’s face by late afternoon following the morning shave.
In the painting, there is an encrustation of afternoon shadows within an interior space that, at least for this viewer, hints at a possible feeling for the uncanny, something that is familiar and yet possesses a touch of the eerie.
Elisa Crossing, Press play, 2026, oil on linen, 122 x 105cm, Photo: Civic Art Bureau.
The painting Intermission is one of the more ambitious works at the exhibition. It combines a fragment from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo classic painting The Swing, c1767, with various interior spaces. As with many artists, Fragonard’s painting casts a haunting and enigmatic presence, and Crossing suggests many different ways of seeing and feeling it.
Her layering of lush realities with the spartan realities of the studio builds a surface tension that is both seductive and intriguing.
The large studio interior space in Press play is perhaps less intriguing and more accessible until we notice the frame-within-a-frame reference, suggesting a mixture of different realities.
The framing of different realities and the idea of a painting within a painting, most beautifully presented in her Vanishing day, are common strategies throughout this exhibition.
Crossing appears to enjoy teasing and intriguing her viewers with enigmatic spaces that, at first glance, may seem like visual puzzles but are not, in that they have no real solutions.
Crossing presents a series of visual entrapments that will seduce the viewer who pauses long enough in front of them to create their own narratives about these beautifully realised and carefully observed oil paintings.
Elisa Crossing, Vanishing day, 2026, oil on linen, 61 x 92cm, Photo: Civic Art Bureau
Elisa Crossing, Move me!, is at Civic Art Bureau, Melbourne Building, upstairs at Smiths Alternative, 76 Alinga St, Civic. It closes on 31 August. Open Thursday to Saturday, from 12 pm to 5 pm, and Sunday, from 2 pm to 5 pm.
