Crossing Point

Crossing Point sets three figures in motion across a landscape that keeps changing beneath them. Bodies overlap and interpenetrate, built from planes of pink, yellow, crimson and green that shift from one to the next without anatomical logic, so a leg carries the color of the field behind it and a back takes on the blue of the sky. Behind the group, a dark treeline, a mirrored lake, and a band of green meadow are laid in as flat horizontal registers.

The figures are walking, and Engel uses that motion to justify the fragmentation. A body in transit is never fully seen, and the painting builds each one from the partial views that movement allows. Limbs multiply where a stride has been recorded more than once, and the group reads as a single organism with too many legs.

Scattered dark spots fall across the whole surface like rain on a lens, sitting on top of both figure and landscape and flattening the distinction between them. They are the clearest sign that this is a constructed image rather than a scene observed.

The title names the moment Engel returns to throughout his work: the point at which a body passes from one state, one place, or one identity into another, and is briefly legible as both.