Billy Crosby may be described, if description must be attempted before luncheon, as an artist making paintings with the assistance of agents, myths, friends, space weather, misread instructions and the occasional glimmering medieval residue.
BBBBBBB Crosbbb they say is an artist of the painted persuasion, lately found pottering about the damp verge between canvas, thinking machines, communal contraptions and small horticultural misdemeanours committed in the digital shrubbery.
His pwictures are brewed with diffusion (and other) modelles and paint in a sort of back-room séance way. One image begets another; a painting whispers to a machine, bbbbb the machine answers in mildew, gold leaf and hallucinated upholstery, and the painting, not wishing to be outdone, returns wearing shiny new red leather boots. These atomic clusters are then fed back into the apparatus, training little visual familiars until a private dialect begins to form: half tattooed fingerprint, half algorithmic haemoptysis.
The whole enterprise nods, with a crooked plume, to the boom bap of the medieval workshop: that bustling old sausage-machine of saints, patrons, apprentices, pigments, piety and unpaid genius. Authorship, never a tidy beast, is here passed round the table aimiably fumbled between painter, model, dataset, collector, collaborator and the day’s prevailing air pressure.
In the devotional manner, images are not merely looked at. They are consulted. They behave like little portals, instruments of attention, painted switchboards for speaking with whatever is skulking just beyond the lightwaves.
The self appears, but never bare-faced. It arrives in disguise: as persona, mascot, minor saint, garden intruder, perhaps a badly behaved heraldic animal. Dr Crosslby does not so much present himself as submit to a chain of translations, being folded, minced, illuminated and re-circulated through breathing surfaces, systems and strange public masks.