Three golden wooden crosses stand on a rock, next to them a symbolic golden river, yellow green pyramids in the background and clouds with lightning. A surreal, symbolic landscape in a flat Memphis style with an unusual color combination.
Product description
This Surreal Crosses T-shirt works like a dream just before waking: you know all the individual parts, but the way they are put together obeys a different logic. On a dusty rose sky that is at the same time the shirt itself, golden yellow crosses stack up on the right into an impossible monument, different in size, different in tilt, one lying flat as if set down, and between them olive green rocks jag out. No fog, no Gothic, instead comic outlines, pastel colors and storm clouds in picture-book format, out of which zigzag lightning twitches.
The real riddle of the picture flows below: from the crosses springs an olive green stream that winds across the surface in zigzags, and it carries no water but signs. Golden glyphs drift in it, fragments of crosses, hooks, curls and symbols that look as if someone had turned a whole pictorial script into liquid. You can read in this river for minutes without finding a single word, and that is exactly its invitation: meaning swims around freely here, and everyone may help themselves.
The back continues the dream one floor higher: there a large cross with a smaller companion stands on an island of cloud, surrounded by a bright pink patch like a clearing in the sky, and the same river of signs plunges down from the island, grows wider, more tangled, until it runs out at the hem as a gold-filled band. On the front the stream rises, on the back it falls, the shirt literally has a gradient, and whoever looks at both sides one after the other feels the dream logic physically: up and down are a matter of negotiation here.
The role of the lightning bolts is remarkable: they are the only elements without gold, small disturbances made of pure outline, and they ground the dream exactly right. Without them the landscape would only be pretty, with them it has weather, and dreams with weather are taken more seriously, as everyone knows who has ever heard thunder in their sleep.
The palette is the opposite of what the subject would lead you to expect: the ground stays dusty rose, the river and its clouds wear olive, the crosses along with their signs glow mustard gold, and the rust belongs to the canyon rocks, all held together by thick, good-natured comic outlines. This softness takes every heaviness away from the heavy symbols and turns them into building blocks of a daydream, closer to surrealist painting and skate graphics than to any church wall.
Worn, the shirt is a one-of-a-kind piece on the street: an all-over print in dusty rose is rare, dusty rose with a surreal program practically nonexistent. It goes with light jeans and beige just as well as with olive and black. Behind the group of crosses stand narrow green tips that you take for leaves at first glance and for rock spikes at the second. This indecision is intentional, it runs through every element of the motif.
It belongs to the dream logicians: people who own surrealist art books, collect skateboard graphics or are simply looking for motifs you cannot finish talking about in one sentence. Art students love it, fans of symbolism get lost reading it, and everyone else simply wears the most unusual pastel shirt in their circle.
At the very bottom stands a small city of stone: narrow rock needles in rose and rust, each built from one outline and one single field of color, and beside them a broad golden slab. It carries the plateau without making itself important. Without this base the group of crosses would float, and the dream would lose its ground.
As a gift it suits everyone whose thoughts like to flow their own way. Should a readable word ever surface in the stream, it wrote itself there, none was planned. Dreams simply do not stick to templates.
Over time you develop favorite signs. A certain curl, a certain hook becomes the quiet favorite in the river, for no reason at all and reliable precisely because of that. That is simply how affection for pictures works, and signs for plenty of favorites are something this stream has in abundance.
