Stairways are magical. They reposition us between levels, heights and depths, like the staging points of our mind. Stairs go up as if to heaven and down into the basements of our private hell.
Stairways are fickle. They curve and spiral. If stairs have a sex, they are female.
We see stairs and we imagine a woman on those stairs. Marcel Duchamp imagined a Nude Descending a Staricase, some believe the greatest work by the greatest of all artists.
Duchamp sees a nude woman on a stairway descending slowly, her body revealing itself in all its glory in quivering, passing segments, in curves, slices and spirals, her breasts, her shoulders, the length of her carved profile, her slender back and bowed rounded bottom, and again as in a refrain from a poem, her breasts, her shoulders, her elegant profile.
Didier Carré has long captured the spiralling fantasy of nude women upon stairways ascending and descending, pausing and posing, inviting us into the mystery.
Carré sets out to show us that stairs are a path leading to a destination but, more, they are a symbol of the path itself. There was a French writer who said that when going to see a prostitute "the best moment is when you climb the stairs." Much of life's pleasure comes from expectation, and it is upon the stairs when we anticipate all that might happen when we enter a room.
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from the rock masters Led Zeppelin must surely have thought a great deal about stairs before penning their masterpiece Stairway to Heaven.
There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
And when she gets there she knows if the stores are closed
With a word she can get what she came for
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure
And you know sometimes words have two meanings
In the tree by the brook there's a songbird who sings
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven
Woe oh oh oh oh oh
And she's buying a stairway to heaven
Clifford Thurlow
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