Tal R has a distinctive way of explaining his paintings. "I constantly have this hot-pot boiling and I throw all kinds of material into it," he told an interviewer some time ago. More recently: "I do painting a bit like people make a lunch box." Add the fact that his London solo debut--comprising thirteen bright and unruly mixed-media works, four embroidered cloth banners, and an installation of thirty-two drawings was titled "Lords of Kolbojnik" (the latter word being kibbutz slang for the rubbish left over after a heavy meal), and it's hard not to wonder, sometimes, whether the Israeli-born, Copenhagen-based artist hasn't missed his vocation.Danish artist Tal R creates thickly layered paintings in which solid forms and bright colours evoke associations with the world of child's play. Tal R has been described as a "painter's painter" due to the ease and exuberance of his approach to the medium. In his work the artist establishes vivid, expressive settings within a pictorial framework composed of three zones: a heading used as a palette, a central area in which colour becomes form, and a lower foundation. The format refers to the layout of the screen of early 80s video games. Tal R's paintings suggest a cross between comic books, graffiti and wild children's doodles. His images subtly transform a picture book naivet? into a menacingly archaic and seemingly violent world.
Tal R's Birth of Laughing Chinaman is a pastiche of visual imagery; the construction of this piece is as incongruous as an out of time lip-sync. Tal R's cartoon-ish drawing obeys no discernable logic. The room, in disjointed perspective, becomes a depository for random items of Tal R's invention: 60's furniture, a ship in a bottle, shrunken heads and voodoo sculptures. Revelling in absurdity, Tal R creates this image simply to will its existence. Collaged elements, such as the film projector and spider web, serve to further distort the sense of space, their applied shapes contribute to the jumbled disorder.But only sometimes; and certainly not in front of a work such as Lords of Kolbojnik, 2002-2003, whose collaged slivers of multicolored paper, radiating dizzyingly outward from a central vanishing point, culminate in a monstrous fringe of pasted-on images of robots, mandalas, crystalline cells, and, predominantly, human figures with oversize, homed heads. A weird but characteristic contradiction: The artwork looked occult but felt sweetly innocent, evoking as it did happily unfashionable teenage nights spent marinating in greasy sci-fi and Aleister Crowley and making creepy collages for the hell of it. The same disjunction marked Last Garden, 2002--a cemetery filled with twinkling, colorful, Popsicle-shaped tombstones--and Cusines, 2002-2003, a seemingly self-demonized quintet of figures, their heads swapped for African masks, a Popeye-like face, or a giant tessellated egg. Both of these were painted with charmingly untutored immediacy, as if Tal R wanted simultaneously to channel the lost impetus of early childhood and of an adolescent goth phase (much of his imagery, he has stated, comes from his own past). And both seemed to be powered by the methane produced by king compressed autobiographical waste.